A New RAID setup, cloud storage

[bcredeur97]

Hello im new to the forum, and I have a few questions about RAID and RAID cards and things like that. Firstly, I have come up with a plan to make my own cloud storage server, and I even know someone who will write a program for me in order to host people's files and things like that. I have access to an amazing internet connection, and plenty of access to PC parts, but when it comes down to RAID Im not exactly sure what to get or what to do. I do know I probably should setup a RAID 6 array so that people can have their data backed up properly. And in order to do this I'm going to need a ton of hard drives and a RAID controller to start(maybe even a few RAID controllers lol). WHich leads me to my first question, What RAID card should I get? Ive heard that LSI and 3ware are the two best RAID card makers to buy from, but which RAID card should I buy, what would be good for a cloud storage setup? Another one of my questions is what is the easiest way to add drives to a RAID array without losing any data? Im confused about this as I have never played around with RAID before.

For hard drives I plan on buying whatever I need to buy, its going to have to start off small of course with only a few TB of total space, but after I get customers I will add more.

Feel free to correct me if I am wrong on anything, I just really, really need to know how to set all this up and actually make money with it.

Thanks for the help!

-bcredeur97

[ProGearUk]

The world internet is basically capped at gigabit and things like WD RED drives have read and write speeds of 150 megabyte per second and gigabit is as close as makes no difference 100 megabytes a second so you could just get a way with having a raid 1 array which loses virtually no speed when transferring data so you should probably just go with that. raid 1 offeres the best protection against data loss because for example if you have a 224 hdd array 12 of those drives have the normal data on and another 12 have the same data on. Look at it or you could also try raid 6 or raid 10 (1+0)

[bcredeur97]

That makes sense, it's just that you can only lose one drive with RAID 1 without losing any data, with RAID 6 you can lose up to two drives. But RAID 6 also means I have to buy more drives, which is more expensive. So I do think RAID 1 is my best option, as always with cloud storage services your data is never 100% guaranteed forever, and the customers should know that.

[bcredeur97]

But for RAID 1 what would be the best RAID card option for a 24 HDD setup?

[bcredeur97]

Anyone know?

[IdeaStormer]

You need to describe the platform you will be using and for 24 drives its RAID CardS. Or a RAID card and an extender.

 

There is also an opensource dropbox type app out there, I forgot the name but its been done, don't think you should re-invent the wheel.

[bcredeur97]

By platform what do you mean? Do you mean like motherboard platform(I.e. Z77, X79, 990FX, etc.) I'm not sure what RAID card to use, that's my question.