[geeks] Recommendations for Home-Use RAID

[Lionel Peterson]

>From: "J. Alexander Jacocks" <jjacocks at gmail.com>
>Date: 2007/08/09 Thu PM 03:27:13 CDT
>To: geeks at sunhelp.org
>Subject: [geeks] Recommendations for Home-Use RAID

>I have a Yellow Machine RAID (http://yellowmachine.com, though the company's
>out of business) that I store all my archived data on.  Right now, it has 4
>500gb PATA disks in it, and is running RAID-5.
>
>The YM works, and is reliable, but has several items that are annoying:
>1) write speed is abominable
>2) security controls are lacking
>3) user interface is poor, and deadly slow, to boot
>
>So, I'm looking for suggestions for a replacement device, or setup.  If
>possible, I'd prefer to re-use the PATA disks that I have (I have a ton of
>250gb and 500gb disks), and I'd like to significantly improve my write
>performance.
>
>Any experiences/suggestions?  I know the YM's lack of write performance is
>due to lack of RAID-5 cache, combined with slow CPU.

Consider Openfiler (http://www.openfiler.com/) and unRAID (http://www.lime-technology.com/wordpress/) - unRAID is limited to 3 drives unless you give them money (not that there is anything wrong with that ;^), $69 for a six drive system, $119 for up to 14 drives. I'm going to try out the free Openfiler on a PC soon (my network has evolved randomly here at home, and I need to step back and start over again)

Lionel