I am planning on making a new MythTV back-end. I am currently running ~4Tb via 8x 500gb IDE drives in RAID 5.

I am currently thinking about building a 30+ drive system with 500gb drives. I plan on doing RAID 5.

I can get 500gb IDE drives for ~$100 while SATA 500gb drives run ~$150.

Will I see such a performance decrease with IDE and such a large RAID array?

I doubt you'll see much of a performance difference to be honest other than the fact that there may be newer faster drives only made with SATA interfaces. I have an 8 drive IDE array and damn I wish it used those nice skinny SATA cables instead of the ribbon cables. 50$ a pop x30 is a decent amount of cash savings though...but at the same time...I'd hate to manage all those ribbon cables!

Another consideration may be how you intend to drive those 30 IDE drives. How many channels per controller card and whether you can manage the cabling (even with round IDE cables)

There's an 8port SATA controller from Supermicro that is dirt cheap (in comparison) at ~110 just search on: AOC-SAT2-MV8. It's PCI-X (*not* express) It will work in anything from old PCI 32bit 33Mhz all the way to PCI-X 133Mhz (64bit). It even includes the Sata cables at that price.

The motherboard of choice in keeping with cheap as possible but high-performance: Supermicro PDSME, it has 4 PCI-X slots and I've read that if you really want to run a C2D in it, it'll work. Personally I'd probably go with a Celeron 356 seeing as how my current server never comes close to 25% CPU useage with a 1Ghz Athlon, old enough that I don't remember it's model name.

Just do yourself a favor and get smartmontools running so that you have a chance of catching failures before they happen. Especially if you intend on running such a large array. Perhaps a hot spare as well.

I've got to ask -- where are you getting 500 GB drives for $150?

While opinions on Samsung drives vary, the Samsung HD501LJ drive is a new item that can be found on atleast two popular online vendors for that price. I've no idea what MSRP is, given that Samsung's drive division never posts such on their website; nonetheless, that's a normal, non-sale price at those two vendors. With holiday specials going on, of course, there are several other 500 GB drives that can be found for that price or lower. Most are limit 2 or 3 though, which would make them impractical for large purchase RAID setups unless one shopped around. 500 GB SATAs for $150 aren't the best bang for buck though, esp. in large numbers. 400 GB SATAs have settled around the $100 MSRP mark across the board in recent months, so with the 500 GB case you're paying 50% more for 25% more capacity.

I was planning on using a 3Ware cards for the drives. They will allow for HW RAID and allow for HW RAID across multiple cards.

Ok, Why?

I am planning on making a new MythTV back-end. I am currently running ~4Tb via 8x 500gb IDE drives in RAID 5.

I am currently thinking about building a 30+ drive system with 500gb drives. I plan on doing RAID 5.

I can get 500gb IDE drives for ~$100 while SATA 500gb drives run ~$150.

Will I see such a performance decrease with IDE and such a large RAID array?

OK, while I only have 22 discs in my current fileserver, my thoughts are this;
If you are budget minded, get as many PATA disks as your m/b nativly will do.
Let the rest be SATA. Get good cables/connectors.
Get a motherboard that has many SATA connectors, preferably not PCI based stuff like the 3114.
Don't make to large arrays because;
*Spinning up the RAID set takes a long time.
*Once you get your first faulty drive, it is a pain to find out which one it is.
*Once you get two failures the pain is worse than ever finding the drives.
(Yes, I have had that more than one time, because of crappy SATA connectors!)
Never lost a byte though. (thank you mdadm/ReiserFS!)

I'm about to move onto my next server, since I have outgrown the current one, and I will group the raid5 sets in 8 drives/set.

If you are planning to run them in the same box;
-Spin down after a couple of hours is nice on Energy, Sound, Heat and Lifetime (assuming you dont spin the disks down too fast). Some hardware RAID controllers will not allow for spindown.
-Get a big powersupply. Power up can be a problem with a weak power supply.
-Plan your airflow, that box will get hot otherwise.
-Mark both ends of each cable, so you will know which ones goes where.

With only PATA cabling, you will have a "not-so-nice" cable rat nest. :)

Personally, I'd LOVE to run a Solaris setup using standard SATA/IDE connnections and run their ZFS on it. If I didn't have a 3ware card now, I'd certainly go there. Check out zfs if you haven't already. You can set up the protection as you want per volume instead of per drive/array and mix and match as required as well as the fact that it checks data integrity itself and seems to perform quite well! VERY impressive stuff IMO!

I'm planning on building a fileserver using Solaris 10 and ZFS. I'm still in the research stage, trying to nail down hardware but I think this will be a killer system. I like how ZFS has integrity checks built-in and only does copy-on-write so there is no RAID5 write hole (like you might have w/o a battery backup RAID card). I read a blog about how ZFS found and corrected silent corruption from a bad PSU and I was sold on RAIDZ and zpool.

OT again, but whilst I've not tried it, ZFS+OpenSolaris certainly looks like a pretty attractive setup for a *Nix network fileserver. If you're after a nice GUI with it, Nexenta OS (an Ubuntu/Solaris hybrid) looks like a reasonable option, though it's still only in beta I think.

Sorry, no other comments - just thought I'd chip in, this forum being the first place I've really seen any sort of comment on ZFS!
C

Ugh, just realised I've resurrected an apparently dead thread. Sorry!! I'll check first next time....

ptysell -- Your price comments on IDE vs. SATA drives is interesting. Five months after your initial post, the prices of IDE vs. SATA drives has reversed. At least around here, I can get SATA drives for less money than the IDE versions (and the interfaces are faster, SATA 300 vs. IDE 133).

interesting.. I'd go sata 2 all day long... native command queuing and hotplug for the win.. :)

Yup, all my newer drives are SATA II (the new version 400GB Seagates have the lowest cost/GB around here - around $0.25/GB - $0.27/GB, when on sale).

one thing to be aware of, even if the SATA II drives have a 300 Mb transfer rate, the vast majority of read or write time is spent waiting for a seek and/or waiting for the sector to rotate under the head. For identical geometries (platters, heads, tracks) and identical buffer sizes, the two drives will give very very close results. SATA is the way to go for the simple reason that it has much cleaner cabling and has the momentum - eventually, PATAs (AKA IDE) will get phased out.

Another thing to consider is that newer motherboards often support more than 4 SATA drives. Which is nice when building a RAID box.