Well, it was bound to happen.....I ran out of disk space.
A lossless music library quickly eats it all up. I'm at over 200Gb now and it won't take long for it to surpass 250Gb which is the size of my largest hard disk. It's not cost effective to buy hard disks over 300Gb so I figure it's time to go with RAID 5 for storage.
A basic RAID 5 system really needs at least 4 disks. Although RAID 5 gives you fault tolerance, it's still not a substitute for backing up so I need another disk to backup important files. If the backup disk is at least the same size as the disks used in the RAID 5 system, it can also act as a spare. Then I need another disk to boot the OS from. So my home server needs to be able to hold at least 6 3.5" disks. My current server case only holds four. Time for a new case!
I ruled out RAID 5 hardware since I prefer to go with soft RAID. With hardware RAID, if the controller fails, you're dead unless you can move the array to identical hardware. I won't have backup hardware so that leaves one exposed to a single point of failure. Soft RAID implemented in Windows avoids that risk and even allows you to migrate the array to a different machine. The problem with soft RAID is that it has slow write performance. Really slow! I primarily need it for reads so the write performance is mostly a non-issue.
Which disks? Calculating Gb/£, it's clear that 250Gb-300Gb is the current sweet spot. I settled for 250Gb since I already have two other 250Gb disks kicking around that may eventually become spares for the array. And the thought of 700+Gb of storage makes my heart flutter! Clearly, it's better to go with SATA since Intel is already proposing to drop PATA support (aka ICH8R) and the cable management is just so much better.
That gave me another problem. My server motherboard has no SATA support. I considered adding a SATA PCI card but I also want to add gigabit ethernet support too and let's face it, PCI bandwidth sucks. Instead of buying two PCI cards, I might as well buy another motherboard and get these as onboard south bridge features. Yep, it's time for a new motherboard too!
As a side issue, my kids also need a new machine. I've forced them to stick it out we a lowly PII machine for a very long time! It kept them away from the 3D games and made them stick to mostly 2D educational games.
So with the requirements fairly clear, I've been reading tons of hardware articles, reviews, vendor websites and browsing the stocks of my favourite etailers (dabs, ebuyer, scan, quietpc, komplett). The choices and trade-offs really are quite complicated.
I finally made up my mind last night and placed orders with ebuyer and scan. I'll be building a new server reusing my cool running P4 1.6A Northwood on a new Asus P4P800-E Deluxe motherboard inside a shiny Antec P180. I'll be using 4 Samsung SpinPoint P120 250Gb hard disks configured for RAID 5.
Then I can keep on ripping my CD's while I decide on what will go in the old case for the kids next pc.