Country: USA
Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Home NAS, remote storage
Other details: Dell PowerEdge T710 (2 Xeon E56**, 12 GB RAM), Dell Perc 6/i (included in the T710), and a scattering of older hard drives.
So here is the situation... I got a Dell PowerEdge T710 from an old job, no drives but all the rest of the hardware (listed above, will go into more detail if needed). Turns out that model, or at least the one I got, has a Perc 6/i RAID card. That means I can do RAID 0 - 10, with 8 available (of which I have 6 sleds) drive bays. Downside is, there is no drive pass through.
I had planned on using unRAID, but that will require setting each drive up as a RAID 0 virtual drive (VD). And I don't know if that will have any down stream effects, if a drive fails or I look to expand later on.
Now the question. What are your recommendations to proceed?
As I see it; I can set up the VDs and use unRAID, or I could set up an actual RAID array. If I proceed with the array, should I go 5 or 6? And what OS should I use?