[nmglug] RAID, SCSI vs ATA

[Tim Emerick]

I have a storage server setup at my house.  It's an old P2-400 with 2-250gb HD's (non-raided).  I'm constantly having to move files around to balance them between the 2 discs so one doesn't fill up.  I've been wanting to put together something together so I could have a storage area that just looks like a big disk as well as maybe add some data protection (family pix being a form of currency around here and all) and RAID5 has come to mind.

I recently came into a Dell PowerEdge 2500 server.  It's an old P3 with 9 hot-swappable SCSI drive bays and includes 3 18g drives.  Only problem is that SCSI drives are relatively expensive and they seem small for my purpose.  I would like to put in 5 PATA or SATA 250GB drives since they are relatively inexpensive and RAID them together with Linux which should result in a 1TB storage device.  Speed is not necessarily a consideration.  1 large space with HD failure protection is.

Anybody have any experience with this? or should I just go buy a standalone NAS box with 1TB of storage?  That PowerEdge sure is big and noisy and I'm sure a heck of a power drain.

I welcome any suggestions from the group.

Tim