Windows Home Server 2011 - RAID controller

[MathijsZ77]

Building my Windows Home Server using Intel Serverboard DS1200KPR.

Anyone who can give me suggestions for which RAID controller I should or should not use for my setup?

I'm planning 6 WD RED 3.0TB drives in RAID 5. 

Thanks in advance!

[dalekphalm]

What is your usage scenario? Is this a home media/file server? What kinds of loads will you be using, etc.

 

Any LSI Raid controller would be excellent, such as an LSI 9260. You could also go with an IBM 1015/1505 or others, which are rebranded LSI cards. You just need to make sure the raid card supports 3TB+ HDD's (which any current or last gen one should).

 

I would however recommend going with RAID 6 if possible instead of RAID 5. The reason why is that in RAID 5, if an error crops up during an array rebuild (after, for example, a drive failure), then there is a chance the entire array could fail.

 

With that in mind, as long as you're backing up all essential data to another drive, then RAID 5 should be fine for home use.

 

Just remember that RAID is not a backup, it's a redundancy used to increase uptime in case of failure. If you rely on the "parity" of RAID 5 to be your backup, then it's only a matter of time before you lose that data.

 

(For example, I use a FlexRAID RAID5 equivalent array for my Media files - blu-ray rips from my collection mostly - but any important documents, family pictures, etc, are backed up onto an external HDD - I don't care if I have to re-rip the blu-rays, since I have them on a shelf, but losing the other documents would be too devastating).