I am used to paying less than 50 cents/GB for a hard drive. This usually means waiting for sales and sending in rebates and such but usually I can find drives that work out to about 25 cents/GB or so.

Now, I am considering building a small RAID array (RAID 5) and I would need 5 SATA drives. Considering past deals that I have found, 5x250GB drives would be $312.50. ($62.50 x 5 = $312.50)

The problem of course is dealing with 5 sets of rebates and such.

How could I still maintain a low cost and get multiple drives?

(The project is mostly for a learning experience configuring a RAID array in Linux but I am using larger drives because while I am at it, it might as well be well suited for years of storage.)

1/10/2006 11:31:45 AM

Quote :

"The problem of course is dealing with 5 sets of rebates and such. How could I still maintain a low cost and get multiple drives?"

simple...you can't (no sarcasm)

1/10/2006 11:56:34 AM

best buy had 120 gb for 30 a pop after rebates

1/10/2006 12:01:48 PM

if this is mostly just a learning experience, then you can buy drives at regular price and return them after you learned how to setup the raid. or borrow drives from someone. you don't need 5 drives to learn how to setup a raid either. i'm not sure I'd want to have the heat and power consumption of 5 drives in my desktop pc long-term.

1/10/2006 12:24:21 PM

^ This wouldn't be in a desktop machine. It would be a central storage solution in a rack in a closet.

It just seemed like it would be a nice project but there are obviously complications.

The logic is that if I do end up using a large amount of HDD space then trying to back that data up would be prohibitively costly if a drive were to fail.

250 GB would take 53 DVDs or 347 CDs, for example.

Tape drives on that scale are expensive and seem stupid for a single-use. Running RAID 0 ("fake RAID") would increase the chances of failure, RAID 1 would improve performance but result in only half of the space being utilized. RAID 5 would permit for a consistent, reliable backup in the event of a drive failure.

Having said that, going with either 3 or 4 ATA drives may make more sense if I were to pursue this. There are just a lot of factors involved.

[Edited on January 10, 2006 at 1:23 PM. Reason : +]

1/10/2006 1:13:37 PM

Uh, raid 0 and 1 do what exactly?

1/10/2006 1:42:20 PM

0 = striping...2 250gb drives is just a logical single 250gb drive and you write parts of the files to both at the same time for a theoretical doubling of write speed (practically : less overhead cost to maintain this)

1 = mirroring 2 250gb drives still looks like 1, only you are making an exact copy on the other drive

1/10/2006 1:44:58 PM

what RAID controller are you going to be using for such a setup?

1/10/2006 2:06:10 PM

Undecided.

I am okay with using a basic RAID controller card that uses a software XOR engine to save cost. Since the system I would use it in will be dedicated to just data storage and low-CPU intensive tasks, having it run at a high processor load isn't much of a concern.

1/10/2006 6:57:38 PM