Home made NAS/file server

[enaberif]

Most boards have 6 some have 8 or more

[Chilly]

Haven't read too much into your post, but just going from what I've skimed your best bet would be some raid/sata cards over limiting yourself to looking at boards with large number of SATA ports.

As for NAS solutions you should look into, heres what I'd recommend;
1. WHS v1 - Windows Home Server, nice, easy, has some cool features such as Drive Extender and duplication.
2. FreeNAS - Free, basic linux based NAS, but not hard to use the webbased GUI at all.
3. Openfiler - Free, a little more complicated to use, but has many features.
4. Amahi - Free, looks like a GREAT solution, but never having read into it or use it myself, I can't say much more than that.

Hope that helps a little

[Blu]

I think my best option after looking through motherboards, since they all come with 6-10 ports but only like 6 of them will work for raid 5 and I want to do better then that, would be to find the best hardware raid card I can find, so whats the fastest hardware raid card that's out there? And can I get your personal thoughts on this? What raid level would be better for an array of 8 Drives to you? Raid 5 or 6? I know raid 6 allows two drives to fail before replacing but I sorta think I'll always have a spare drive on me just in case. Also will the hardware raid card tell me by serial # what drive died on me in the chance one does fail and die on me or will it be a guessing game of disconnecting each drive and such? Alright time to get some sleep and dream about my next project...Jezz I'm not even done my HTPC and I'm thinking of this hahaha...

[Perineum]

Anyone know off hand if you just download openfiler it allows you to have 16+TB of storage? Or is that the one you have to pay for?

[Perineum]

Very good RAID cards are in the thousand dollar mark.... I wouldn't even know what the "best" one would cost...

[Chilly]

Originally Posted by Perineum

Anyone know off hand if you just download openfiler it allows you to have 16+TB of storage? Or is that the one you have to pay for?

Openfiler is fully open and free, you only pay for the manual and/or support.

Now their support is segmented, if your using more than 16TB you have to go with their Enterprise support selection.

As for you Blu, for a CHEAPY, OLDIE but a GOODIE, the perc 5/i is a decent hardware raid card which I have some personal experance with. Other than that I can't say, their might be better solutions nowaday but for the price the perc 5/i back in the day was a great deal.

[Blu]

Newegg.ca - 3ware Internal 9750-4i SATA/SAS 6Gb/s PCI-Express 2.0 w/ 512MB onboard memory Controller Card, Kit Says it can connect 96 Sata/Sas devices, how is that possible I only see one connection on it...

Newegg.ca - LSI MegaRAID Internal Low-Power SATA/SAS 9261-8i 6Gb/s PCI-Express 2.0 w/ 512MB onboard memory RAID Controller Card, Single Thats nice as well. But with the price of things I might be looking at going raid5 instead of 6...The price difference is just to much I think.

I really like this one,
NCIX.com - Buy LSI MegaRAID 8208ELP 8 Port 3Gbps PCIEx4 Low Profile SATA/SAS/RAID Controller Card with Cables - LSI00108 In Canada.

Can someone help me find a nice 8port hardware raid card at a cheap price? Thanks.

[Nexitus]

To get up to the maximum drive amount is by using expanders.

[Blu]

Originally Posted by Nexitus

To get up to the maximum drive amount is by using expanders.

Can you show me one :D?


EDIT: Edit, okay, I've decided I'm going to do this, make either a raid 6 set up and then a raid 5 set up with all the possible drives I can stuff in a case, I'll probably do two raid 5 set up's though, one on the motherboard and one on the raid card.

[LarkStarr]

wow, that completely defies the point of RAID

XD

is googling SAS or SATA expander really that hard?