Noob Question...4 in3 cage and RAID5

[ice7400]

Hi, I'm damn close to build my new system, until I found out more information about RAID and the server...So, my noob questions is

1. what is 4 in 3 cage, are there anything to do with hotswap, what is the advantage for this thing?

2. RAID 5 is the system that will allow you to hook up HDD up to 8 in one computer right? The data will be divided to 1/#of drive, then it makes the server access the file faster, and I correct?

3. So, if I'm right on Question2 , what RAID card do you guy suggest if I want to have 2 HDD for now, and later I can upgrade to 4HDD, do they have the card that is upgradable?

4. How to calculate the time that UPS will be available in case of Black=out since server consume more power than regular computer?

Thx in advance guy,,really appreciated...

[insomniac]

The real question is: Why would you want a raid and its extra overhead on a video server? If you really care about certain shows that you recorded, move them to a library location on one of your hard drives and back that up with/onto another hard drive or cd/dvd/zip drive every couple weeks/months/etc.

Save money, gain space, dont trash your drives, and save noise by going IDE.

I.

Originally posted by ice7400
Hi, I'm damn close to build my new system, until I found out more information about RAID and the server...So, my noob questions is

1. what is 4 in 3 cage, are there anything to do with hotswap, what is the advantage for this thing?

2. RAID 5 is the system that will allow you to hook up HDD up to 8 in one computer right? The data will be divided to 1/#of drive, then it makes the server access the file faster, and I correct?

3. So, if I'm right on Question2 , what RAID card do you guy suggest if I want to have 2 HDD for now, and later I can upgrade to 4HDD, do they have the card that is upgradable?

4. How to calculate the time that UPS will be available in case of Black=out since server consume more power than regular computer?

Thx in advance guy,,really appreciated...

[stanger89]

Originally posted by ice7400
Hi, I'm damn close to build my new system, until I found out more information about RAID and the server...So, my noob questions is

1. what is 4 in 3 cage, are there anything to do with hotswap, what is the advantage for this thing?

It puts 4 3.5" drives in 3 5.25" bays, some are hotswap (meaning you can change HDDs w/o powering down the PC). The primary advantage is fitting 4 drives in 3 bays, if you don't have enough room for all your drives. Hot swap is unimportant IMO, because this is for personal use so powering down the PC to change an HDD is no a problem.

2. RAID 5 is the system that will allow you to hook up HDD up to 8 in one computer right? The data will be divided to 1/#of drive, then it makes the server access the file faster, and I correct?

RAID-5 is striping with parity. The largest card I'm aware of are the 12-port 3ware cards, which you can put 12 drives on one card (you can put multiple cards in one system for multiple arrays). With RAID-5 one drive worth of space is used for parity info so the array is (N-1)*size of drives, where N is the number of drives. The primary purpose of RAID-5 is to provide redundancy with increased storage, if any one drive fails no data is lost. RAID-5 can, with a good card like the 3wares, be faster than single drives, but that's not a big deal for a media server.

3. So, if I'm right on Question2 , what RAID card do you guy suggest if I want to have 2 HDD for now, and later I can upgrade to 4HDD, do they have the card that is upgradable?

For expandablility what you're looking for is Online Capacity Expansion, which lets you add drives and grow an array, but I'm not sure you can change array types. For example, with 2 drives you'd be running RAID-0 or RAID-1, I'm not sure if you can convert from those to RAID-5, so you may need to start with 3 drives in RAID-5. I would recommend 3ware for RAID cards, specifically the 9500 series. The 9500s are supposed to add OCE this summer. If you need OCE now, you'd have to go with LSI or Raidcore. I'm won't recommend Raidcore because they have had some serious issues (drives dropping out of arrays for no reason). LSI's are probably fine, but they support a max 6 drives.

4. How to calculate the time that UPS will be available in case of Black=out since server consume more power than regular computer?

I'd check out the APC page, they have a UPS calculator:
http://www.apcc.com/template/size/apc/index.cfm

Thx in advance guy,,really appreciated...