13 karma · joined October 27, 2009
The first server I had used a Promise card (Supertrak SX6000) card (with 4 * 80 GB drives) that gave me nothing but problems (very poor performance and corrupt arays about once every 2 months). It was running on a standard non-server mobo with a decent but standard PSU, so one of the components might have caused problems tho.
The second was running on an Areca ARC-1210 card (with 8*320 Gb drives) on a tyan thunder dualxeon server mobo with an 850Watt Tagan server PSU and was put behind a 2200VA UPS. Even then the array seemed to dropout quite often and I have spend 100's of hours in total (updating drivers/firmware/OS'es, recovering lost data, replacing parts, cables, moving the server etc...) trying to get it to run decently.
Eventually I just sold the whole damn thing and bought me a simple COnceptronic CH3SNAS with 2 1,5TB drives for the cash I sold the old server for. I have ever never had a single problem in the whole year i've had it and am very happy with the purchase. The performance is totally not comparable (600MB/Sec vs 20 MB/Sec), but even the slow NAS is sufficient enough for me (it streams HD movies just fine and my backups aren't TB's big anyways ;) ). Plus the power usage is literally 1/10th, it's very quiet and a lot easier to carry around and take with me if I need to.
Maybe I just fail at fileservers, maybe I just had bad luck with 2 bad cards, but I'm not convinced a simple affordable RAID-5 solution means your data is safe.
But I must admit I wouldn't mind having that self made NAS at my home tho, it looks cool :D Maybe one day i'll try again.... ;)
etc...
$60K a year is peanuts for most companies.