Very true. I have already filled up >10TB of space with my DVD and BD rips, and I have only done about half of my video collection. Haven't even started on my CD collection yet (plan to rip/encode to FLAC and MP3).

I have one running 5x2TB WD Green (in SPAN mode) and 2x1TB WD Green (in SPAN mode) off a E7400 + Asus P5N7A-VM, running Vista HP (32-bit) since I have a spare licence. This rig serves as my backup server. I use SPAN mode to create a large block of HD space without redundancy, as this will act as backup storage only (the main storage will be in a RAID-5 array).

I will soon be replacing the CPU/mobo with an unused Q8200 + Gigabyte EP45-UD3P since I plan on using the E7400 plus the mATX P5N7A-VM to build a NAS into my unused SG-01 casing (plan on 5x2TB HDs, 2 in the internal drive bays, 3 in a IcyDock 3-in-2 removable drive cage in the external drive bays). I have started to look around at FreeNAS to run this NAS, and the possibility of using a CF-to-IDE adapter to boot the OS off a CF card via the IDE port. This NAS would be headless and kept in my store-room next to my main home switch.

My main server should be completed by this week, as I just need to pickup a good HSF (thinking of TR's Venomous-X) and a cheap GPU (Radeon 5450 possibly) to power 2 monitors. I will be running 2x2TB WD Black (OS + fast HD for video ripping/encoding), and 8x2TB WD Green in RAID-5 off an Areca RAID controller. I know of the possible TLER issues with the Greens, but the RE4s cost twice as much, and at current prices, the additional cost is RM3.2K. So I am hoping that since I also have a full backup in my other rig and I hope I can change the timeout settings on the Areca controller, things should be ok. CPU is a i7-870 with Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD4P mobo and 8GB of Kingston VR. I've mounted 2 units of IcyDock's 5-in-3 removable HD cage in my CM Stacker casing, and plan to add a 3-in-2 cage as well for another 3 HDs. So in theory, I should have 14TB of RAID-5 storage now, with another 4TB (less what the OS takes up) of fast storage (off the WD Blacks) to speed up my rips/encodes. Potentially another 6TB of storage once I get myself down to Singapore to get my IcyDock drive cage. The OS will be Win7 HP (64-bit) at present, though I will consider using Windows Home Server v2 when it is finally launched.

I will also use my new server to test the CF-to-IDE adapter (using 2x16GB Kingston 133x CF cards) for possible use on the NAS.

Looks nice but after factoring cost of tools and resources (plus skills), probably end up costing more than just buying a cheap roomy casing and plugging in all the HDs.

Not that complicated lah:

I have NAS Rig#1 (E7400 on Asus mATX mobo) with 12TB storage (5x2TB WD Green in SPAN mode, 2x1TB WD Green in SPAN mode) running Vista HP (32bit) at current time. The Asus mATX mobo has 5 SATA ports only, and I am currently using a PCIe x1 SATA controller with 2 SATA ports.

I will build NAS Rig#2 (using NAS Rig#1's CPU and mobo) with 10TB storage (5x2TB WD Green or similar HD) in a small compact SG-01 casing. I want to try using a CF card as the OS drive (via the IDE port). Plan to try using FreeNAS as the OS.

Having taken out NAS Rig#1's CPU and mobo, I will use my spare CPU/mobo (Q8200, Gigabyte EP45-UD3R), as its new CPU/mobo, which will allow me to add the 8th HD as the Gigabyte mobo has 8 SATA ports).

Am currently building my main server with 18TB storage (8x2TB WD Green in RAID-5 = 14TB, 2x2TB WD Black = 4TB) using a i7-870 and Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD4P mobo. I use an Areca RAID controller to hook up the 8 RAID drives, and the rest I use the onboard SATA ports (2x2TB WD Black, 2x BD optical drives, 3x future HDs, 1x spare). Plan to use Win 7 HP as the OS now, and may change to WHS v2 when that is released. Maybe I should post a pic after I finish assembling the PC this week, so it will be less complicated

I also have a Synology DS408 NAS (4x1TB in RAID-5 = 3TB) and a D-Link DNS 323 (plan to put in two old 160GB SATA drives, as this NAS is VERY slow). After I filled up the 3TB on the DS408 in a very short period of time, I decided to go all out and build my main server.

This post has been edited by Traveler: Jul 20 2010, 03:43 PM

Yes it is NTFS volume based. Theoretically, if one disk fails, we may be able to recover the rest, but I would, for safety's sake, assume a total loss. Normally, I wouldn't even consider it, but for backup storage on a rig that is only switched on for backups, I find it quite acceptable, especiallly when the main storage is on a RAID-5 array.

Most are WD due to price and so far in past 2 years, WD has been very reliable, while I had a new 1TB Seagate HD fail on me (lucky it was in a RAID-5 array, so I managed to rebuild with a new drive; Seagate RMA was easily and painless, and I received my refurbished replacement drive soon after). Haven't bought any Samsungs as I figured for my 8-disc RAID-5 array I would stick to the tried and tested. But I am keen to try them out, so may consider them for the additional HDs I will be buying (subject to the price remaining at good levels).

I expect the CF-IDE drive to be slow, but hopefully not too slow. As I only plan to use it in a NAS, I hope it will be ok. In any case, it's just an experiment I am running now, to see if it works well. As I have 2x 16GB CF cards there, I am tempted to see if I can run it in RAID-0 to speed things up.

I just assembled my main server last night, with almost everything hooked up except for the HDs and a few minor items.

Results of my ad-hoc testing using 2x 16GB Kingston 133x CF cards in RAID-0 on a CF-to-IDE adapter (BIOS recognizes two drives, RAID-0 setup under Win7 as BIOS does not support RAID for the IDE channels):

Files used: 4.6GB of DVD rip files
Read (from CF cards to WD Black): 42MB/s
Write (from WD Black to CF cards): 9MB/s

As expected the write speed was quite slow, while the read speed was actually not bad. I would imagine if I didn't RAID the cards, the speed would have been much slower.

So far in my dual 5-in-3 drive enclosure (80mm fan at the back, exhausting into case) that is stacked on top of each other, my drives are showing temps between 37C-43C. Drives are 1x WD Black, 4x WD Green in each enclosure. The Greens are RAIDed so when I access my RAIDed drive, all 8 Greens will run. So far so good, no heat issues.

Any of you running RAID-5 mind sharing what your transfer rates are, for comparison purposes?
I don't have much to compare yet, just a network-based file copy (since its a huge one, needs time to finish)

I'm running 8x 2TB WD Green (WD20EARS) in RAID-5 on an Areca ARC-1222 controller (Win 7 HP 64-bit).

LAN-based transfer over 1Gbps LAN from another PC, 4x 2TB WD Green (WD20EARS) in SPAN mode to the local RAID-5 array, using Windows file copy from mapped drive
Total transfer size: 6.69TB (estimated total transfer time: 24 hours) - entirely video files in .avi, .mkv, and BD/DVD rip directories.

Average transfer rate: 74.9MB/s (as measured after 2.18TB has been transferred)
My NIC is showing I am using around 700Mbps of the LAN bandwidth, so not sure if the LAN is saturated (with the remainder used by the LAN overhead) or if the bottleneck is the RAID-5 write speed or the source SPAN array (my guess is that it's either the RAID-5 write speed or the LAN is saturated).

Once this is completed, I will try some other combinations like WD Black -> RAID 5 (same computer) and then in reverse, to get a read-based transfer rate.

I bought it at this out-of-the-way shop in Sim Lim Square (Singapore) - think it was TakNet, they cater mostly to businesses but I dropped by and they had a whole range of Areca and Promise RAID cards. I don't have the receipt here with me, but I remember paying around S$700 for it plus some accessory cables (before GST refund of $34).

For external HDD 2.5", my current favourite is the WD Passport Essential SE (USB3) 1TB. Have 3 of those, so far so good. If you don't have a USB3 capable PC, then you can either still get this WD unit, so you can future-proof your investment (especially if you plan to upgrade your PC in the near future), or you can just get a USB2 external HDD (you can also buy the HDD yourself and put it into its own enclosure, which is my personal preference).

Usually I would go for a 2.5" HDD from one of the major manufacturers - WD, Seagate, Samsung, etc, I usually get the cheapest unless I hear something particularly good/bad about a particular model, and then get a cheap but decent enclosure to go with it. But since the USB3 drives are out, I've been buying the WD units. USB3 is so much faster.

Right now I am doing two simultaneous file copy actions:
1. RAID-5 internal HD array to USB3 Probox HD (WD Green) - averaging 46.3MB/s after 80GB out of 313GB transferred
2. USB3 WD Book Essential 3TB to USB3 WD Passport SE - averaging 26.2MB/s after 44GB out of 601GB transferred

Both the Probox and the Passport are connected on the same PCIe x1 USB3 card, while the Book Essential is directly connected on the motherboard's USB3 connector. Not sure if the PCIe x1 card is a bottleneck or not.

Thanks. Will give Teracopy a shot.

It comes with USB3 and eSATA. But to use eSATA, I would need an eSATA port multiplier PCIe card as my motherboard's eSATA ports are not port multiplier. It's cheaper to buy a USB3 card, which is what I did. I've not tested it myself but I seem to read (in a few posts here and there online), than USB3 is marginally faster than eSATA in real life use.

Most of my transferring is done in hefty hundreds of GB chunks.

When placing HDs into a drive cage (case in point, CM's 4-in-3 HDD cage), does it matter if the hotter HD is at the top or at the bottom, if you have a 120mm fan blowing air into the cage?

I have 1x WD Caviar Black, and 3x WD Caviar Green that I am putting into CM's 4-in-3 HDD cage with a 120mm CM "90CFM" blue LED fan blowing air in. The fan will be controlled by Aerocool Modern-V fan controller with the temp probe taped to the circuitry side of the WD Black (I believe this should be the "hotter" side of the HD). My arrangement options would be:

Option A: Black on top:
1. 2TB Black
2. 2TB Green
3. 3TB Green
4. 3TB Green

Rationale for this would be that since the Black is hottest, by placing it on top, it would least affect the temps of the lower HDDs. However, any heat from the lower Greens would warm up the Black a bit.

Option B: Black on bottom:
1. 3TB Green
2. 3TB Green
3. 2TB Green
4. 2TB Black

Rationale for this would be that since Black is hottest, by placing it on the bottom, it would be minimally affected by the Greens. However, it's own heat would heat up the Greens, especially HD#3.

However, with the temp-controlled 120mm fan blowing into the cage, is this issue even a concern?

As this rig will be doing a lot of DVD/CD ripping, I expect the HDDs will be having long stretches of work. Will heat be an issue or am I overly worried? Immediately above the HDD cage are 2 DVD-RW drives which will get hot from ripping.

I've had rigs with many HDDs before, but they've always been HDDs of the same type (usually WD Greens) so I couldn't do much about it anyway. Any thoughts?

What I eventually tried was the Caviar Black on the top slot (slot 1), 2TB Green in #2, and 3TB Greens in #3 and #4. I placed a temp probe on the spindle motor of the Black, so that I can monitor the temp. So far it's ok and below 45C. But I have yet to stress it, as so far I have only installed Windows and anti-virus software and have not started mass ripping.

Yes, I agree the "90CFM" is a false label (which is why I put it in quotation marks), and it is not a quiet fan. I will monitor the temps and if they stay below 45C during full usage, I will keep the fan (for cost reasons, as I want to minimize expenditure for this rig). I will however take a look at the AC F12 fan as per your recommendation.

Thanks for the comments.