Building a computer, I need raid advice Raid 5 vs 6 / mobo vs controller.

Here's my take on your situation.

If you're going to have a dedicated drive for media/downloads then use the bigger drive (WD Black 1TB in your case). RAID-5 is the way to go if that's the redundancy you're looking into with a maximum 5-drive array. However, anything bigger then you should probably look into RAID-6 or unRAID (don't know much about that one). I've been told that I should've stuck with RAID-5 instead of moving to RAID-6 with my 6-drive array. Well you know what...I'm just a very paranoid person when it comes to keeping my 10+ years of data in a very redundant state. Getting a dedicated controller card should be a given when working with advance RAID setups (anything that isn't a simple RAID-0/RAID-1/RAID10/RAID0+1). That's because those dedicated cards are meant to handle that type of workload. I haven't read too far into it...but from what I remember...you're decreasing the time it will take to rebuild a broken RAID setup and the likelihood of corruption during the rebuild. You will also experience very low write speeds whereas most dedicated controller often work at a decent state during a rebuild. Areca makes one of the best RAID controller cards (very expensive) as well as LSI and Adaptec (from what I've read). Most people on this forum look into PERC 5i/6i cards for a budget setup. I'm very unfamiliar with those as well as any SAS port card which is why I went on Ebay and found a simple Areca card that used typical SATA ports. Since onboard RAID is likely to be using a software type setup...you'll most likely lose it if you try to transfer the RAID setup out as well as whenever you change the motherboard it's connected to. A RAID card is transferable so any RAID setups connected to it can be read on any other computer. If you run into some bad luck with a RAID card dying on you then your best chance of recovering your data is getting the same card of the make/model/firmware. This leads me to recommend sticking with Windows 7 since it's tough to say whether manufacturers of RAID cards have working drivers for the new Windows 8 OS (less headaches). Those new WD Red drives are the best you can use at the moment since they seem to be made for RAID setups. I currently use Seagate XT drives but seeing that the 2TB version being overly expensive the the 3TB not being made anymore after the so called flood incident...I don't recommend them anymore.

It depends on the amount of data you intend to store, the degree of redundancy you are looking for, and how fast you want the array to be. If using theonboard "fakeRAID ", your CPU will be in charge of allocating space, and while this is not such a big deal with a RRAID0 or RAID1 2-disk array, it can be very taxing on anything bigger, especially as you have a somewhat older processor.

I personally would get the PERC6/i card, and I recently saw one on eBay that was pulled from a brand new server and came with the Battery Backup Unit and Breakout Cables for just $60.

If I were you, I would run a 2x600GB WD Velociraptor RAID0 array for the speed needs, and then use a RAID Controller Car ffor a 3-5x RAID5 array. I personally think that the WD RE4 is the idealddrive for the vast majority of consumer RAID arrays. It's reliable, designed for such use, and I typicallysee aabout a 5-15 percent increase in performance over the Caviar Blacks. The TLER function is also beneficial. Running a 5x RAID5 + 1x Hotswap via the PERC6/i + BBU on RE4 1TB drives will give you around 500+MBs read speeds and similar write speeds if you take advantage of the RAID Controller Cards cache (one reason why the Battery Backup is so nice).
Two 600GB WD Velociraptors in RAID0wwill give you 300-330MBs Read and 315-330MBs Write speeds, and the access time will be nice and low making it ideal foraanything requiring strong sequential access, such as movies, games, or video editing.
Combine the abovewwith a strong SSD for boot/OS/primary apps, such as the Samsung 830 256GB, and you will have an ideal home storage system that is bothcrazy fast as wwell as extremely reliable.