I want to build a 2.8TB storage array

[Mike Tomlinson]

A friend proposes an alternative: Getting two four-drive external
enclosures and connect them to my existing desktop with Firewire. Does
this make sense?

I'll bow out here as I have no direct experience of Firewire-attached
arrays but will watch followups with interest.

The puritan in me does tend to think you should keep it simple and do it
with controller cards and drives designed for the job (whether
PATA/SATA/SCSI) rather than a general-purpose serial connection with
interface/protocol adapters which will add an extra level of complexity
(= more to go wrong.)

 

[Arno Wagner]

Arno Wagner wrote:
[...]

Re-download the movies in case it fails? Might be a bit slow on
restore... ;-)

I think running the thing on a dedicated box with a server OS and setting
the security right might take care of the more common causes of failure
needing restoration from backup--just don't expose it on the Internet and
make sure the system areas are not writeable by the normal user and the
malware problem pretty much goes away.

This will help but is not a replacement for backup. Backup also
protects from user/administrator failure, i.e. accidental deletion
or destruction of files or partitions.

On the other hand, if one of the
host adapters dies and takes the array with it then it's toast.

That is a non-issue with software-RAID (at least under Linux).
As soon as you have an inoperable array, there are no writes to
it anymore. The most you loose is comparable to what happens in
a power-failure.

Arno