RAID Alternatives?

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RAID Alternatives?

I'm not sure if this belongs in the raid forum, but I am trying to design a home media server that will suit my needs. I was thinking about a Mac Pro (3.2, 16GB, 2x 500gb Drives) for encoding 2 dvd's at once using handbrake at 2500KBP/s for streaming to Apple TV's. The hard drives in the mac pro would probably be for a software raid 1 config, and a fibre channel card would connect the pro to a 2 TB RAID (i am using external storage to allow for expansion). After realizing the cost of this system is going to approach $25,000, so I was wondering if I could reduce costs by using something like this - http://www.transintl.com/store/category.cfm?Category=2715&RequestTimeOut=500
(x2 of the 4 port ones)
With these cards, i would connect many seagate freeagent pro esata drives and raid them in a RAID 5 configuration (with RAID card).

My Question is - Would there be a significant decrease in performance by using the esata drives instead of a Fibre Channel RAID (over a wireless n network) ? Does anyone recommend any other solutions for decreasing costs?

Macbook Core Duo, iBook G4, 2 iMac G5 Pre-iSight, 2 iMac Aluminum, MBP 2.33, Mac OS X (10.5.1)

Posted on Feb 2, 2008 7:12 PM

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Answer 1

Camelot

Level 9

58,593 points

Feb 2, 2008 11:27 PM in response to MattBA

Well, the most obvious problem is that card appears to support RAID 5 on Windows only, so you're not going to get RAID 5 with your SATA drives unless you use an external enclosure that handles the RAID work.

Other than that, if you're planning on accessing this wirelessly, then it doesn't matter as far as speed it concerned. The wireless network is going to be your bottleneck.
It might have an impact on the encoding process, but it won't help with playback.

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