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Home server - hacked together storage or brand new hardware?

post #1 of 4
10/29/12 at 9:41pm
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Hi all,

I'm looking to rip my music to FLAC and store it on my server for streaming with mpd. I have access to a bunch of laptop HDD's of various sizes but I don't want to have tons of different drives so I'd probably raid them to form a larger logical drive.

Sorry if I'm a terminology noob, I've never done this kind of stuff before.

What is the best way to tie these drives together to make a single drive visible to my OS that I can store music on. Is this a RAID card functionality?

Or is it better for me to invest in a few terabyte hard drive and go from there.

Also if the first option is better, any suggestions on a cheap RAID card? I have a PCI slot available on the computer.

Toodles! redface.gif
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post #2 of 4
10/30/12 at 5:03pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by zachdoescompute View Post

Hi all,
I'm looking to rip my music to FLAC and store it on my server for streaming with mpd. I have access to a bunch of laptop HDD's of various sizes but I don't want to have tons of different drives so I'd probably raid them to form a larger logical drive.
Sorry if I'm a terminology noob, I've never done this kind of stuff before.
What is the best way to tie these drives together to make a single drive visible to my OS that I can store music on. Is this a RAID card functionality?
Or is it better for me to invest in a few terabyte hard drive and go from there.
Also if the first option is better, any suggestions on a cheap RAID card? I have a PCI slot available on the computer.
Toodles! redface.gif

I would invest in a few TB hard drives and go there. The way you are talking about tying the drives together is a raid 0 array. With a raid 0 array you have 0 chance of recovering your data if there is a drive failure, and you are doubling the risk of having a failure. There are a few other arrays, but I really think you're just looking to expand on your space. How much extra space do you think you will need? How many open sata slots do you have now?
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post #3 of 4
10/31/12 at 6:56pm
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Thanks for the input.

Would you suggest running a different RAID array? I don't think I'll need much more than 500GB total for all my storage needs. Could I use a handful of drives to accomplish this? I'm hoping that I'll have 3-4 300-500GB HDDs.

Also what is the best way to implement RAID? The computer I'm interested in using is a few years old and low power (it will be on all the time). I don't think it would have many SATA ports so I was looking into a PCI RAID card. Any limitations to those?

Thanks!
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post #4 of 4
10/31/12 at 7:08pm
The only way you are going to get these in RAID and add them together to make one large single storage device would to be using RAID 0. When using this, if you were to add even one 300GB to a RAID 0 array, the capacity of your 500GB drives would be reduced down to 300GB.

If you have one 300GB HDD and 3 500GB HDDs in RAID 0, you get a 1200GB Array, not including space used for formatting. So realistically, you will have ~1100GB from four HDDs which isn't practical. This renders the 300GB HDD nothing but a determent since three 500GB HDDs in RAID 0 will have higher capacity.

I would suggest going out and buying a 1 or 2 TB drive and call it good. This will greatly improve reliability and reduce the complexity of your operation. thumb.gif

Edit: Also, How much storage would you need for your media?
Edited by Shaded War - 10/31/12 at 7:13pm
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