HighPoint has an external 4 SATA drive enclosure w/ RAID card for around $420 (us). It seems to support all flavors of RAID and the card packaged with this kit cost $250 on its own. So really, all being told, $420 is pretty cheap. The enclosure is a bit on the "fugly" side but seems practical w/ removable drive caddies and a handle (I guess for easy throwing or bowling type situations). With this setup, one could have a super fast terabyte of data, fully redundant, for around $1500.
Two questions:
1.) From a my understanding a PCI-X card can work in a regular PCI slot just at a reduced speed, is that correct?
2.) Has anyone used RAID 10 (I think it is technically RAID 1+0)? It seems to offer the same speed as striping with the benefit of redundancy and no parity overhead to kill write times. Of course 2 of the 4 drives are "wasted" but with drives so cheap it's not really that big of an expense and certainly worth the peace of mind.
Any thoughts are appreciated.
Here is the link to the HighPoint site:
http://www.highpoint-tech.com/PDF/X4/HighPoint%20X4%20with%20SAF-TE%20Enclosure%20Management.pdf
edit: maybe it doesn't include the RAID card. Still investigating... some sites make it sound like they come bundled together.
Two questions:
1.) From a my understanding a PCI-X card can work in a regular PCI slot just at a reduced speed, is that correct?
2.) Has anyone used RAID 10 (I think it is technically RAID 1+0)? It seems to offer the same speed as striping with the benefit of redundancy and no parity overhead to kill write times. Of course 2 of the 4 drives are "wasted" but with drives so cheap it's not really that big of an expense and certainly worth the peace of mind.
Any thoughts are appreciated.
Here is the link to the HighPoint site:
http://www.highpoint-tech.com/PDF/X4/HighPoint%20X4%20with%20SAF-TE%20Enclosure%20Management.pdf
edit: maybe it doesn't include the RAID card. Still investigating... some sites make it sound like they come bundled together.