IDE and Raid 5 Server

I have been moving all my non work data onto a Synology NAS, and now Im left with 7+ IDE drives ranging from 160gb-400gb. I was wondering whether I could build a cheap RAID 5 server with them. What hardware would I need for such a beast and is it even worth it?

you could use some extra PCI IDE controllers and use mdadm?

I'm not sure about cheap, but you could use an Adaptec 2400 board. That does RAID 5 on up to 4 IDE drives, and is a reasonably powerful board, with RISC processor and user-upgradeable memory to keep the RAID overhead off the main CPU. But they weren't cheap, and I don't even know if you can still get them.

If you want it cheap, I would follow Steve B's advice & get a cheap mobo & supplement the onboard IDE connector(s) with some PCI IDE controllers, or possibly even use IDE>SATA converters if the mobo has SATA connectors as well as IDE. Either put on a lightweight install of a Linux distro like Arch or Debian & use mdadm, or use something like FreeNAS (NAS install based on the m0n0wall BSD barebone).

another vote for freeNAS :)

finding the right IDE radi controller is going to be a little harder.

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Originally Posted by Saracen

I'm not sure about cheap, but you could use an Adaptec 2400 board. That does RAID 5 on up to 4 IDE drives, and is a reasonably powerful board, with RISC processor and user-upgradeable memory to keep the RAID overhead off the main CPU. But they weren't cheap, and I don't even know if you can still get them.

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I had 8x200G IDE RAID5 on a 3Ware 7506-8 for a very long time until I retired it 2 months ago.

http://cgi.ebay.com/3ware-Escalade-A...3A1%7C294%3A50

One of the cheapest I could find. These cards work great. I've had 35MB/s write to the array with 60MB/s read. Consider it is first gen IDE RAID card the speed is quite good.

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Originally Posted by arthurleung

I had 8x200G IDE RAID5 on a 3Ware 7506-8 for a very long time until I retired it 2 months ago.

http://cgi.ebay.com/3ware-Escalade-A...3A1%7C294%3A50

One of the cheapest I could find. These cards work great. I've had 35MB/s write to the array with 60MB/s read. Consider it is first gen IDE RAID card the speed is quite good.

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Thats sounds great... What type of motherboard etc would I need... Im a Mac user, so building is a bit alien... having said that I built my first Hackintosh 6 months ago and Im pretty pleased with it... although I would have liked an 8 core version rather than 4, and the RAM options are a bit limited with 4 slots... but for £500 or so I cannot complain.

Be warned that with a RAID5 array you can only build an array of capacity (N-1).S_min, where N is the number of drives and S_min is the size of the smallest.

You say that you have some 400GB IDE drives, but you would only be able to use 160GB of these, if 160GB is your smallest drive.

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Originally Posted by Steve B

Be warned that with a RAID5 array you can only build an array of capacity (N-1).S_min, where N is the number of drives and S_min is the size of the smallest.

You say that you have some 400GB IDE drives, but you would only be able to use 160GB of these, if 160GB is your smallest drive.

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Mainly 300GB, 250GB I could always use a 160Gb as a boot and the others as spares

Alright, in that case, you'll need a motherboard and CPU, maybe 256-512mb RAM, and a crap graphics card to get things running until you can run it headless.

I've just went the debian route, which was interesting!

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Originally Posted by Skyline65

Mainly 300GB, 250GB I could always use a 160Gb as a boot and the others as spares

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I run freenas off a liveCD with a USB Key for settings so all my drives are for data

I suppose it would it be better/cheaper to grab a dodgy old PC/Server off Ebay and stick in a RAID card, does anyone have an opinion on which are any good and ones to avoid?