Ok, I've not really looked at much pc related for the past few years so am seeking a bit of advice regarding a proposed raid setup at home.
Basically I am looking to sort out my storage as for the past few years it has been pretty disjointed and is now at the stage where I can't find most things that I may look for, so I was thinking of ripping all the drives out of one of my pc's and buying this Raid Card with the battery backup module (frequent power cuts in this house) and over the next 2/3 months buying 8 1TB drives to run either raid 5 or 6.
The pc/array is to be used primarily as storage but with some redundancy and also as a way of me organising everything as I move it to the array, it won't be running more than a few times a month when I want to watch something from it or want to move more data to it, the rest of the time it will be off, though when/if I move next year I would like to chuck it in a corner and just use it to stream to a few media players around the place so would be looking to run it 24/7 at that point.
Firstly would the above be a good thing to do? also having seen these figure I could use one of the drives that are currently in the pc in this to take a regular image of my main pc and monthly ones of the other two machines plus any important info (pics, emails etc) it would also be handy to use to move data from the existing drives to the array.
The specs and drives of my 3 pcs are as below, plus also the external nas/enclosures that I run at the moment.
Main PC:-
Asus P5WG2WS-Pro
Core2Duo – 6600 @ stock
Vista Ultimate 64 bit
Adaptec AAR-1420SA 4-Port SATA-II RAID Controller
4GB Ram
Drives:-
500GB
400GB
500GB
750GB
750GB
1TB
1TB
750GB
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Proposed Pc to base array on.
Asus P5WD2-Premium
XP Pro -32bit
2GB Ram
Adaptec AAR-1420SA 4-Port SATA-II RAID Controller
Pentium D 3.2@3.7
Drives:-
320GB
500GB
500GB
500GB
400GB
500GB
400GB
750GB
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PC 3
Gigabyte GA-945GZM-S2
Adaptec AAR-1420SA 4-Port SATA-II RAID Controller
Vista ultimate – 32bit
Pentium D 3Ghz @ Stock
2GB ram
Drives:-
500GB
1TB
320GB
750GB
750GB
500GB
500GB
500GB
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External Storage:-
4x D-link DNS-323 External Nas units containing the following drives:-
a.) 2x 500GB Seagate drive
b.) 2x 500GB WD Drives
c.) 1x500GB Seagate
d.) 1x 1TB Samsung
1x Lacie Big disk External 1.28Tb
1x Lacie Big disk External 1Tb
1x 500GB USB caddy
I would really like to be able to ditch some if not all of the external storage as the cabling is a little crazy with everything plugged in and the UPS is only a small one so runs two pc's and a dns unit for only a short time.
Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated as I have let it all slide over the years and have just bought more and more hard drives as I needed storage but it's all a bit much now.
Cheers


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I'll have a look around the bay for prices on lto drives + tapes, for me the most important data will be my emails and various files (pics,scanned letters etc) for which I have a 16GB usb memory stick doing nothing that I will call into service to regularly backup too, the rest of the data I would hate to lose but it wouldn't be devastating if it went one day as there is only so much I can do to minimise potential data loss.
