Two of my storage drives (WD 500’s) decided to up and bite the dust on me with the wonderful clicking-noise-of-death syndrome. Unfortunately, one of them had our document files, including family pictures, and of course the last time I remembered to back stuff up was in February ::) Needless to say I’m in the doghouse at the moment. Luckily, almost all the pictures had been uplaoded to Photoworks, so it is just a matter of downloading them one at a time….
Previously I just had the drives installed on a Asus M2V-SLI Deluxe without any Raid setup. I had tried to set them up in a software RAID5 on the board, but kept running into issues with loosing the drives out of the array and other issues, so I gave up on it.
Now that I have two replacement drives being shipped to me, I am thinking about putting all 3 in a Dell GX620 which has 4 onboard SATA ports and running FreeNAS. My idea is to use them to store AVI files, as well as other files I won’t be accessing very often. As for TV recordings, those will be recorded on stand-alone drives on the ASUS board (which is running SageTV).
So, really as long as the software RAID5 setup will provide enough output to watch AVI files over the network (on SageTV clients and a SageTV HD Extender), my only other question is the reliability of software RAID. While I would love to get a hardware RAID setup, I just can’t justify the cost.
Should this work for what I need?
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