Dude, at the end of the day,

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August 8, 2011 at 4:49 pm #5144
santanan

    Dude, at the end of the day, since you aren’t sure what you need, just get an off-the-shelf product. At least until you understand the benefits of building your own. Remember you can always sell it.

    What it really comes down to is Storage Capacit vs. Performance. There are many factors that come into play when deciding which route to take.  And remember the cost factor also. 

    I choose best performance over anything else. Bandwidth is important to me since networks tend to grow and the performance is crucial. With RAID 10 I have the comfort of having performance and fault tolerence needs met, at the expense of storage capacity. But this is the most costly route to take. Besides, you can have multiple RAID configs.

    I suggest you decide the storage capacity you need first and then go from there. Building your own HTPC/NAS can become rather expensive. Remember, at the end of the day, it’s a computer and you can always change configs and/or upgrade if you need to. But as long as you have the foundation, the posibilities are endless. Start with something simple and modify as your needs expand/grow.

     

    To simplify RAID 5/6 vs. RAID 10:

    RAID 0 or RAID 1 are not options for your wants/needs/requirements, that is the reason i didn’t bother mentioning them.

    Raid 5(RAID 6 is similar but IS NOT always offered as an option with controllers):

    RAID 5 is the preference for HOME use since you get more storage capacity and you get the fault tolerence needed.  This RAID option requires extral processing power to write parity information, which benchmarks show a performance decrease on writes.

    The storage capacity is equal to the total of all drives minus 1.

    RAID 1+0 (currently better known as RAID 10):

    A Raid 10 VD performance is similar to its equivalent Raid 0 VD.  A minimum of 4 HDD is required.

    Example: “2” HDD Raid 0 VD = “4” HDD Raid 10 VD

    This RAID config will ALWAYS have the best read/write performance hands down.  Any benchmark will prove that.