Low Cost raid 5 solution?

What are your specific speed and redundancy needs? If you're just watching movies off of a server, you don't need the speed of striping in RAID. If you don't need the fault tolerance of RAID1, mirroring, then you may not need RAID. In my mind, unRaid is pretty ideal for Home Theater storage use. There is a decent level of fault tolerance for non-essential media, like ripped movies and audio, and it's cheaper per unit of storage than most RAID. If you have a crappy old box laying around, you can probably build an unRaid system pretty quickly, and cheaply, given the large number of disks that you already have from your JBOD.

Like the OP I've got a similar desire. In my case our Main Household PC (Win Vista 32-Bit) is used for general apps etc (all on 1 320GB HDD) but it is on this PC I've added 4 x 1TB HDD (with 1 spare sata port) simply for Media Storage that is accessed as shares over the LAN by my other PC's (incl HTPC). I've not even bothered to JBOD them as the front end HTPC server (www.jrmediacenter.com) hides the physical location of the files. It all works but I'd like protection from one of my 1TB Media Drives failing to save from having to re-rip of my disks again (Note: I seperatly backup files to 1TB NAS for those I cannot replace eg my C: Drive's user data and from the Media Disks my Home Vids etc).....so I'm looking either at:
1) Software Raid in Vista: From what I understand I don't think this is available
2) Snapshot Raid: eg Flexraid
3) HW Raid Card: my reading is that these can be more problematic...but any advise is welcome
For me its got to be simple, cheap,expandable and most importantly work!

Thanks
Nathan

Any response to this?

I used to use mobo RAID5 and RAID1, worked awesome; i had several drives fail over the years, and each time i'd just overnight a new one from newegg, pop it in, and off it rebuilt itself. Previously I had lost 3 HDDs with DVDs on them, and had to rerip 50-100 DVDs each time. God that sucked. After the mobo RAID5, i've had 1 HDD die, but it was super-duper simple to recover and no re-ripping needed.

The token issue with RAID5 on mobo is that if the mobo dies, you're screwed. If the mobo dies with RAID1 you're ok as you can pop that into another box.

The primary reason I left mobo raid (both 1 & 5) and went to a HW card is that I wanted to exceed 2TB (mobo RAID5 doesn't allow that) and have >6 HDs (most mobo's only have 6-8 SATA slots max). I tried the "cheaper" RAID cards (ie, i have an LSI one that cost me $300 that i'm going to be eBay'ing soon), but i'm not technical enough to get it to work right. I ended up with a damn expensive 16channel Highpoint 3540 RAID card, holy crap is it fast and awesome, but it was $800. I have a 2x1TB RAID1 and a 5x1TB RAID5 on it, expandable to much more. I used WHS and created a GPT partition, so I have a single 3.8TB array (I bypassed the WHS console).

Well, now that i've typed that out you'll see that HW RAID isn't really low cost, but it is expandable and it is awesome and just works. Then again, so is mobo-level RAID, and for 99% of the populace I think the odds of a mobo dying are quite low.

I don't know squat about Vista, but I have to believe that ICH8R/9R/10R (mobo RAID) must be able to work on it, that's what i would recommend. You can even build multiple arrays up to whatever # of HDDs your mobo supports. A single 1TB boot disk, 2x1TB RAID1 for "critical data", and a 3x1TB video array gives you 3.5TB of usable space (.5TB on the boot, 1TB on RAID1, and 2TB on the RAID5).

If you have to run Windows on your main storage box, I don't think there is a RAID5 or RAID6 solution that can meet all of your requirements. There is simply nothing available that I would consider to be Simple, Cheap, Expandable and Reliable (my interpretation of "work").
Personally, I chose Simple, Expandable & Reliable and bought a relatively expensive 3Ware 9550SX-8LP hardware RAID card. This was a while ago, so I wouldn't currently recommend that specific card, but it is absolutely reliable, easy to manage, and easily expandable. It can even deal with the 2TB limitation of XP 32bit and can provide a single volume that is up to 16TB.

- Mike

I'll echo Seth's comments about UnRaid - it may feel a bit unconventional, but it works great and I love the flexibility.

No perfect solution yet despite all the brains trying to solve this problem.
You can throw a lot of money at it or you can settle for what fits your budget.

If I can ever get FlexRAID Live! out, you will have something to truly smile about (real-time, cheap, fast, reliable, and flexible).
The snapshot nature of FlexRAID Basic can be a serious shortcoming depending on what you are after.

If you are really frustrated, just mirror your data and call it a day.

You can buy a dell perc 5/i controller on ebay for around $100. Supports 8 SATA drives and does RAID5 like a charm. check out this link:

http://www.overclock.net/hard-drives...card-tips.html