First big-ish RAID setup

[Englishman]

Hey all

 

I've been hoarding drives recently, and have ended up with 8 750GB drives, all SATA.

 

Was thinking that it might be worth throwing them all into an array, either RAID 5 or 6. I don't have a huge amount of faith in the reliability of the drives, and the overall capacity is not a huge problem. It will be used mainly for media storage, so performance isn't a huge issue either. But of course, it's always preferred.

 

So here's the thing, i am unsure about what to control the whole setup with. I have been looking at the HP P410 controller with 1gb cache + battery, as they're pretty cheap to pickup on ebay and the such. But i'm unsure if the HP cards will work fine in a non-hp build, it'll either be going in my supermicro-based workstation or asus-based desktop.

 

Another possible issue with the P410 would be that i would need a (presumably very pricey) license to enable RAID6 on it.

 

So if the HP cards won't be a good road to go down for me, what would be the best solution?

 

Or, an entirely other way to go about it... abandon the whole RAID setup and buy a single large capacity drive?

 

Thanks for any help!