I've got this really old file server with a pitiful 60GB drive in it. A few months back, the free space on the drive dropped to under 1GB. With an MSDN subscription and a love a music, it won't take long before this last gig would be used. To make matters worse, this 60GB drive was swinging solo. One tiny spec of dust or too much vibration and my files would be gone in a single scratch. I needed something newer, bigger, and less likely to crash and burn on me.
Rather than deal with the ailing file server, I invested in a new Dell SC430 "server". They're cheap and have a base configuration that's perfect for my needs despite the fact that some wouldn't consider them servers because they don't contain server quality hardware. Potato. Potahto. However, the SC430 case wouldn't fit the number of drives I wanted. My goal was a build a TB file server. I analyzed the going rate for hard drives per GB and concluded that a 320GB drive would give me the most bang for my buck.
I had an old 5 bay, 5.25" SCSI enclosure from back in the day just collecting dust in a closet; the 200MB x 4 hard drives in it became obsolete many years ago. However, I felt a SCSI solution was too expensive and a bit of overkill for my needs. Instead, I decided to invest about $40 into modifying the enclosure to support a MultiLane SATA connection. Since MultiLane only supports 4 drives, the extra bay in the case could be used for a cooling fan.
Last week, I ordered all the bits and pieces. Yesterday, enough of the main components arrived. I'm still waiting for the enclosure conversion kit, but I am able to hook up enclosure using standard SATA cables (it just isn't pretty). I installed the OS on the server, slapped the drives in the enclosure, installed the SATA cards and drivers, and setup the RAID (no point in spending money on a hardware RAID when software will do me just fine). Viola, 894GB of data crunching RAID-5 goodness.
So why only 894GB? Wouldn't 4 320GB drives give me 1.29TB? Well, in RAID-5 you lose a drive because of parity information that is being stored, which is used to recover should a drive crash. Also, hard drive manufacturers like to lie. To them, 320GB means 320,000,000 bytes. This equates to 312,500MB (320,000,000 / 1024), which equates to just over 305GB. Tricky, aren't they? Still, you'd think that would mean my RAID drive would be 915GB. So where did the other 21GB go? That I don't know. I assume there's either more RAID overhead or a weird space/time continuum thing. I know enough about hardware to be dangerous, but not enough to find those missing bytes.
Sadly, I fell short of my goal of a TB file server (not counting the 2 80GB drives in the server itself). Oh, well. Considering I bought four 320GB drives for the cost of one 750GB drive, it wasn't too bad of a deal. The loss of overall storage space is worth the peace of mind.