what to look for in a raid drive

yup, i saw that site when i was searching for info on raid drives here. everything up to raid 5 i already knew. i couldn't find any info on what drives to actually use though other than the professional drives were best, but they were out of the budget. since this isn't a mission critical server, just don't want any dataloss, i decided the samsung spinpoints had the best rating for reliability.

coorect me if i'm way off here, but from the way it was described to me, the internet radio server simply streams a single stream of music out to whoever happens to log on to the website, so there isn't a whole bunch of different streams running at once. i'm thinking that means that even though the spinpoints are only 3gb sata that they will have more than enough throughput for that environment.

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Originally Posted by xr4man

coorect me if i'm way off here, but from the way it was described to me, the internet radio server simply streams a single stream of music out to whoever happens to log on to the website, so there isn't a whole bunch of different streams running at once. i'm thinking that means that even though the spinpoints are only 3gb sata that they will have more than enough throughput for that environment.

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I'm sure a single HDD could handle dozens of streams if necessary. The disk loads the songs in to RAM much faster than they can play. Don't even worry about it.

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Originally Posted by xr4man

i'm thinking that means that even though the spinpoints are only 3gb sata that they will have more than enough throughput for that environment.

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No current platter HDD can saturate even 3Gbps SATA anyway, so that won't be a concern.

this has been all very good info and i thank you all very much.

however, i just learned yesterday that this is not actually the server running the internet radio station. it is just going to be a file repository and storage. so i think it will only need a single 2T drive and an external drive for back ups. it won't be turned on unless adding files to the repository or uploading new music to the server.

just a little disappointing because i was wanting to actually build a raided machine.

hmm, maybe i will anyway if it's cheaper to raid some 1T drives than to go with a 2T drive.

stay tuned for a worklog on it in july sometime.

OOC, do you have any particular reason to use an external drive for backups? Setting up dual 2TB drives in a RAID 1 will offer better performance and would, imo, be the better option barring some specific reason to use an external.

only because he already has an external drive with all his files on it.

after looking at some pricing, it looks like 3 1T drives in raid 5 will actually be cheaper than 1 2T caviar black drive. so i may still go the raid route anyway.