Special build - max no. of 3.5" drive bays for massive storage

[Multicore]

My point was that you wanted to run a few drives a few years, then move to the next set of drives ect ect. If one fails that kind of makes it moot. RAID 5 doesn't really help this either because you'll need to replace the failed drive within some point depending on how fast you are filling the drives while you're away from the machine physically.

you mean to say to keep a copy of the data of one drive on another ?
drive filling rate is about 2 TB per year.

 

[C0RR0SIVE]

RAID5 allows you to setup HotSpares... As in, the array can automatically rebuild if you setup an active "spare" provided the controller supports it.

 

[Multicore]

RAID5 allows you to setup HotSpares... As in, the array can automatically rebuild if you setup an active "spare" provided the controller supports it.

didn't knew about that before, upon researching more about it, found out that all three namely HDD+RAID controller card+mobo , should support this feature, but correct me if i am wrong. i am assuming this may drive up the cost as all this stuff sounds to be of the enterprise class.

 

[PP Mguire]

You can do RAID 5 with any device that supports it, which happens to be a lot of modern boards. The thing with controllers is you need a motherboard that will play nice with the controller.

 

[C0RR0SIVE]

A lot of this stuff is Enterprise, but has trickled down to the consumer market. Like motherboard controllers. They usually support Raid5, but don't have the HotSpare function built in. But a cheap $150 SAS controller usually has the HotSpare function built in. The trick, like PP said, is getting a controller and motherboard that play NICE together. Sometimes the two different controllers in a system will conflict with each other or request the same addressing pace.