Originally Posted by
x88x
So I'm in the planning stages of rebuilding my fileserver, and since I'm gonna be buying completely new drives I want to get the best drive density possible, so I've decided to go with 1.5TB drives. I used to be a die-hard Seagate fan, but after the 7200.11 generation (and some similar problems I've been having with some 7200.10 generation drives I have) I've decided to go with WD's offerings. Now, I already have two of the 1.5TB EADS drives, and I'm quite happy with them as far as read/write speeds are concerned, but each of them is operating independently (one's the storage drive in my main rig and the other is currently serving as an external). Now, for my fileserver I want to do a RAID5 (or possibly 6, down the road) volume across all the drives, preferably hardware based, but it'll just be a NAS so throughput will never be over a couple gigabits, max.
What I'm wondering is if there's anyone around who has any experience or suggestions concerning RAIDing EADS drives. I've heard they play merry hell with S.M.A.R.T. sensors because of they stop their heads so often, but I haven't been able to find an account of someone who has set up a non-0 RAID with EADS drives.
Also, does anyone have experience with/know if it's possible to do a single hardware-managed RAID volume across multiple controllers? Like, say I had a MBB with dual 16x PCIe slots, I could buy a cheaper controller with fewer channels now, then later when I max it out, get another controller but still continue to grow the volume across the second controller.
Like I said, it's just gonna be a NAS, accessed probably by a max of 2-3 computers at a time, but with quite large files. I'm definitely open to the idea of doing a software RAID, as I assume that would give me a lot more flexibility with driving across multiple controllers, but I haven't had good luck growing a RAID5 software-raid volume in testing in VirtualBox...though it's entirely possible that the problem there is VirtualBox.
thoughts anyone?