Originally posted by: PerfeK
Both of the cards come with 8 1m cables, right? I know the 1820 does but I can't find any open box pics of the 2220.
not a clue
something at concerns me, though..
Originally posted by: PerfeK
I want, no, I need, hot swappability. I don't care how much they cost. I need hot swap bays for 6-8 SATA drives. Can someone point me in the right direction?
Yet you imply that you're not really concerned about uptime, just about keeping the data safe (having only the single non-redundant system drive, etc).
IMHO, you should
really scale back some of your hardware if this thing is just going to be a fileserver.
Drop the hotswap bays alltogether. So you have to take down the system for 15 minutes to remove / replace / reboot. Big deal. If you were building a mission critical server, it would be, but that really doesn't sound like what you're doing. You just want storage space for a bunch of music and videos and such for two people to access.
Throttle WAY back on the processor, etc. The Athlon 2500+'s are a really good value right now and still get you decent performance. Get a lower-end motherboard with integrated graphics since it's going to be running headless most of the time anyway, right? And you said heat/power consumption was an issue, so grab a mobile 2500+ and underclock it a bit .
The drives you picked are nice ones, but really for mass storage PATA drives are a much better value. Sounds like most of the time, this thing isn't even going to be accessed through a gigabit network (your Dad's laptop?), so amazing performance isn't an issue, as you'll be limited by the network most of the time anyway.
Taking this in mind and considering the advice from someone in an earlier post, you might consider not going with hardware RAID. Just grab a bunch of really cheap PCI IDE controllers (2 or 4 ports apiece), throw them in your PCI slots, and do software RAID through your OS. My hardware RAID recommendation may have been a bit over-zealous.
FYI: from what I've read, windows does a fairly poor job with it's software RAID -- if you can, you may want try to do it in linux. I'm not sure what sort of hot spare options there are with software RAID, though. Be sure to read up on that beforehand.
One of the nice things about RAID is that you can get decent performance and a lot of storage for a low price. Now you can also have mind-blowing performance for a ridiculous sum of money, but that's not what you're going for. Really reconsider this large sum of money you're spending -- as was pointed out, you could get a prebuilt solution for around the same price as you're spending to do it yourself.
I'd recommend using PATA drives -- shouldn't cost more than $600 for 6, 250GB drives (that's only $0.40/GB; not hard to find that kind of deal). If you stick with hardware RAID, okay .. there's another $200 - $300 for an 8-port card. Figure $200 for your case and power supply. We're at $1100 with the hardware raid. I'd say you're nuts if you spent more than $400 on the rest of the components. That brings you to $1500 for HW raid or around $1300 for software (I'm figuring high at $25 * 4 for controller cards -- 2 port PCI).
Just consider that before you go blowing money on things you really don't need.
Nick