[709]

Hokay. I'm taking the plunge into unknown territory and I'm hoping you lot will handhold me here a bit.

I've got another HD project coming up. After the last two painful experiences with my measly Medea SCSI 160 RAID I've decided on building my own 8-channel SATA RAID.

The players involved:

1 Sonnet Tempo-X 8-Port PCI-X Controller (199.95)

1 Burly 8 Bay SATA Enclosure from MacGurus (451.00)

8 Seagate 7200.8 200GB Hard Drives (135.00 per @ New Egg)

and of course all the jumpers and a internal>external SATA faceplate (~100.00).


SO, given that, does anyone have any suggestions as far as enclosures? The Burly is pretty fugly, but I don't need hot-swap or anything fancy, and this is the only one I could find reasonably. Could I use a PC tower? Or would that involve controller whatchamajiggies and 150/300 v.per cycle fan whatnots? If so, that's not for me.

Hard drives? I know that Maxtor has some new MaxLine III drives that spin quite a bit faster, but I've always had great luck with Seagates and don't really want to jinx myself.

I'm pretty excited by the new Sonnet card. Their website touts 500+ MB/s sustained :



That's probably not even close to 'real-world' performance, but hell, even 400+ would be a nice kick in the pants!

So all that for ~2 Grand. Pretty sweet considering I just set up a friend's Huge (same capacity) that he spent nearly 3 times as much on.

Thoughts?

[hmurchison]

Mike Curtis from www.hdforindies.com has had great performance from a similar setup using the Tempo-X. I think you're fine here.

[709]

Sweet. Thanks for the link hmurchison.

Like him, I'm a tiny bit freaked out it only handles RAID 0, but at only 1.6GB it's easy enough to backup to FireWire drives. RAID 10 would be ideal, but that 400+ MB/s throughput is mighty tempting.

On the plus side, Sonnet is talking about upgrading the firmware sometime in the future, so other RAID options should become available.