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Home Raid

Over the years I have become somewhat of a digital pack rat.  I started with a simple setup consisting of 4 300GB drives attached to an adaptec raid card running raid 5.  When that ran out of space I added an additional 5 500GB hard drives and proceeded to fill those.  But a lack of raid resulted in a large loss of data one day.

It became clear to me that I need a lot more storage, more redundancy from drive failure, better throughput and something that could give me some bragging rights.

The solution was to build a large raid box with TONS of storage using multiple mirrored raid 5 arrays.  To do this I purchaced a Norco 4224 case and equiped it with the following:

  • 1000 Watt power supply
  • Dual CPU Xenon Processor motherboard w/procs
  • 16GB of Ram
  • 2 3ware 9500S raid cards (12 Sata channels each)
  • All required 8087 -> Sata cables
  • Replacement (Silent) fans
  • 12 1.5TB hard drives
  • 12 2TB hard drives
  • Server 2008 R2

 Once completed this setup ran for a few years before i managed to fill it up and then require more space.  The solution I came up with was to add another Norco 4224 with an additional 24 3TB drives running off a new raid controller located in the previously configured server. 

This expansion consisted of the following:

Both of these cases are rack mounted in my basement and a run 24x7.

 

 

 

**2024 update, things may have gotten a little out of hand.... This is only one of the 2 racks 🙂 each of the 24 drive chassis is setup differently. One is using TrueNas, One is using Unraid, One is Raid 6 using LSI cards, the last one is using Drive Bender on server 2018. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses.