Raid card for home server

[hunchback]

I am looking to build a home media file server. I want to run some sort of raid (not sure what yet) But i would want a minimum 8 disks. I am thinking raid 5, 6, 5e, or 5ee. I need some suggestions on a good quality raid card. I would rather not go above $500, and i would really prefer to stay below that. But i do understand that you have to spend a decent amount of money to get a decent raid card. It would be preferable to have something that has the capability to add disks to the array without having to rebuild the WHOLE array!

[Eric1024]

There is no raid card that will allow you to add disks to an array to my knowledge. That's just a limitation of RAID itself. My recommendation is anything LSI, particularly a LSI 9260-8i. It supports every standard RAID level, but it's 530$ or so. Sad fact of the matter is that good RAID cards are expensive.

That all being said, I'd like to present you with another option. Get an ibm m1015 for 100-110$ (it's a host bus adapter with one sff-8087 connector, allowing you connect 4 disks natively) and an intel RES2SV240 for about 275$ (sas expander card with 6 sff-8087 connectors, meaning one input from the imb card and 5 outputs for your disks, allowing you to connect 20 drives for future expandability (and you can daisy chain the cards)).

This will cost you about 400$ and will allow you more expandability in the future, HOWEVER, this is NOT a hardware RAID solution. With this setup you should employ a software RAID solution such as flexRAID, which is much easier to use than hardware raid (and this is coming from a hardware RAID 6 user off of a good lsi controller). flexRAID will allow you to add drives without rebuilding the array, like you wanted. And with processor speeds these days, even on something like a pentium or an i3, software raid isn't really going to be any slower. So that would be my suggestion. Hope that helps!

[looney]

There is no raid card that will allow you to add disks to an array to my knowledge. That's just a limitation of RAID itself.

Simply not true, most cards will support Online Capacity Expansion (OCE)

[hunchback]

Thanks for all the suggestions. Im thinking now to do a software raid because of flexibility and cost. Now i just have to decide which server solution i am going to use.....