Building 1TB RAID at home, first whack
Written on the original Movable Type site and recovered from the Internet Archive.
Thanks Rich for your latest recommendations for High end PCs. While I toyed around with buying RAID from an existing vendor like Iomega, Snap Disk, or a white box guy (look for those reviews soon), I have decided that it would be more fun to screw the thing together myself. Also cheaper. No support, but what else do I have to do with my weekends. Also I decided that I only need Raid 0. I can build two Raid 0 boxes for the price of one professional Raid 5 hot swapable box. For home media I don’t need the hot swap. I can write my own mirroring script and get the same level of redundancy. So I decided to buy a PC chassis and all PC parts and just run it as a big file server. Here are the parts I am buying. The only real concession I have from a traditional PC form factor is the 4U rack mounted case just for convenience. Going to install a copy of Suse 9 that I already have.
Home 1TB RAID Server
CPU
Athlon 3200+
$199
Frys 11x multiplier, should over clock to 2.6GHz easily
Memory 1GB
Very fast at DDR466
Motherboard
ASUS K8N-E Deluxe
$149.99
Frys, 6 SATA RAID chips on Motherboard, 3GB memory
Case
SUPERMICRO Beige 4U Rackmount Chassis, Model “SC742T-550 Beige”
$307.50
New Egg. Has 7 SATA backplane built in
CD drive
NEC 3500A
$67
newegg or zipzoomfly
system drive
WD740GD
$185
10000 rpm system drive
Data drive
Maxtor DiamondMax 10 250GB
$149.99
($.59/gig vs $.68/gig for 300GB) 5 of these bad boyz
total: $1933.48 or less than $2 per gig for RAID. Half the cost of white boxes and 1/3 the cost of anything from the channel.