andrescasta 0 Report post Posted January 2, 2006 Hi, Thanks in advance for all possible replies. This is the cross-road we're in: We need very large storage and NAS are expensive. We do need data to be safe also. We will install 4x300GB drives. Need RAID 5 The two choices we have are: 1) Buy a PCI RAID card like INTEL SRCS14L (4 port SATA1 hardware RAID w/64MB cache). Or 3ware or any other reviewed card in THG last SATA RAID which are very powerful, have hardware XOR offload, auto-rebuild, battery backup, cache, etc. This cards are quite expensive, and the computer that is serving data today is an Athlon XP 2000+ which is hot. 2) Get a D955X or similar, with ICH7R, and use the Software RAID, move to a P4 3GHz or so, 1GB RAM, and use the software RAID 5. Which might have the same final cost of a hardware RAID solution. This "server" only does file-serving. Will use Windows and maybe SFU (Services for Unix) to give NFS support... This last choice will also add to that computer a GB Ethernet, x64 support, etc. What I don't know, and there is not too much info on Intel site, (or is too hard to find) is how does it works with Auto-Rebuild, how much CPU will the XORs take, etc. And mainly how safe will data be? If I format the boot drive, will it recognize the array? Any other info will be greatly appreciated. Thanks again. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
