10 hard drives, single machine, what to do for performance and data protection.

I currently have 5x2TB and 2x500GB drives. I'm not sure what to do about setting these up in a machine i'm building.

I'd very much like to be able to potentially move the array to a new machine in the far future, but then i'm unsure if pci-e raid controllers are reliable enough to last a long time.

Also, what's capable of handling 10 drives, or should i look at getting like 2x8 slot cards. I also would need the ability to add more drives in the future when needed.

I don't have $1500 to drop on a Drobo or a pre-made system that i can throw drives in, i have a machine capable of running what i want, just need to figure out how to configure these damn drives.

Not a web server or porn lol. It's all internal data only within our family, and i'm able to block all external internet access to this machine leaving it internal only. It just needs to be a file server. Small part DVR/Music, huuuge part business data like hundreds of vmware images.

I should've stated i could drop the 500's just to make things simple, but expandability in the future on the 2TB array is a must for future.

I've always been a fan of adaptec raid controllers, but you'll pay more for them.

I'ld just use on of the 500gb drives for the OS and software then use 2tbs for the data. I'ld use RAID50 with a shared hot drive. Rebuilding a 20tb RAID5 array will take forever, RAID 50 would solve this by spliting it down into smaller spindles and you get the added performance benefits of RAID0 instead of just JBOD. Also i'ld make a note to try and use enterprise drives where possible, use redundent gigabit NICs (considering how cheap they are it would be stupid not to) and use gigbit switches throughout, you'll need a UPS too or a battery assisted RAID cache to avoid parity errors if the power fails.markop2003

Which is why I recommend RAID 6, 2 drives dying is very unlikely. The reason I'm avoiding 50 and 60 is because they can be a bit more troublesome.

Which is why I recommend RAID 6, 2 drives dying is very unlikely. The reason I'm avoiding 50 and 60 is because they can be a bit more troublesome.

JigglyWiggly_

The only time I've seen harddrives dying simultaneously is with the deathstars.

I have always been a fan of Raid 1+0.

Are the disks going to be mostly full and used only for reads or are they mostly empty and going to be used for writes?
If you are mainly reading off of them Raid 1+0 should be slightly better than Raid 5.
If you are mainly going to be writing to them, Raid 5 will be slightly better.

Just make sure you get a strong card that will be able to handle the I/O.