First time RAID Array Woes

Brio · January 6, 2018

Hello everyone,

For the past few weeks I've been submerging myself in the ins and outs of setting up a RAID and I feel like I could use some peer review/insight. The plan that started all this was to begin making myself a larger storage area with built in redundancy. I have a bunch of 250GB-1TB hard drives floating around my room and they're all full. I needed a place to store all my files (all. of. them. ) so I can organize them, archive them and possibly use the external drives as live storage or cold storage for things (depending on how things worked out). Doing some research I determined that a NAS or a RAID array would probably be my best options for storage. Having been gifted four Seagate - BarraCuda 4TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drives, I thought, oh heck, this'll be easy to get working, just plug em in and go right? Wrong, already started off realizing I needed some SATA cables because they of course can't communicate via magic. Then that led to "Oh crap. Do I have enough SATA ports on my Motherboard?!" Upon checking I have six at my disposal on my P8H61-M PRO ASUS motherboard, which provided to me, two problems:

Problem #1: I already have a SSD and HDD connected to this computer that hold all that computer's files. (I want that to stay just the way it is because it's working fine and I don't wanna break it.)
Problem #2: I have a CD/DVD drive connected which means it's already using a SATA port to exist. So that leaves me with only 3 SATA ports left to use, two of which are completely dwarfed/obscured by my GTX 1060. As a result I don't know how best to attach 4 hard drives to this board so my computer can "see" them.

After some digging into solutions I came up short and visited the local Microcenter; they recommended the VANTEC 4 Channel 6-Port SATA 6Gb/s PCIe RAID Host Card Model UGT-ST644R. This card seems to be what I need it to be with one caveat; the back of the box says it supports RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 10 and HyperDuo (whatever that is?) but makes no mention of RAID 5, or RAID 6. I had hoped to take advantage of RAID 5 because it seems like the best option for my 4 HDD, providing me with 12TB of capacity and tolerance for a single drive failure. The issue I'm attempting to find closure with now is, will I be able to use RAID 5 with this card or is that not possible because the card specs don't mention its supported?

EDIT: Upon attempting to see if the RAID card would fit in the PCI slot I learned that because of a small "tab" on the pcb it won't even slot into the motherboard unless I cut it off which will undoubtedly void the warranty. And seeing as how I don't know if it's even going to work I've elected to not use the card...getting it to work would require a new motherboard because the GPU covers up an entire PCIe lane and two SATA ports. (As marked out in the red area) And a new motherboard would would require me to get a new CPU, and new RAM...at which point my computer will be a completely different computer from when I started tinkering. Which just means more time, money/headache that could probably be solved with an external NAS.

tl;dr

Needed More Storage, feel that a RAID will give me what I need + automatic redundancy.
An external NAS also seems like an option but is too expensive to pursue at this time.
Have four 4TB hard drives to utilize (Yes they're not technically rated for use in a RAID like Ironwolf drives, but they're cheap and it was something I could utilize immediately.)
Didn't have enough SATA ports. (EDIT: Still don't at this point in time) ~~Bought a RAID Host Card with 6 ports (effectively doubling what I have available); doesn't explicitly say it supports RAID 5 and not sure if that's a problem.~~

Questions to solve:

Is a RAID the best way to go about solving the initial problem or is this needlessly complicated, with a more elegant solution available that I've neglected?
- (A suggestion from a friend was to "plug one drive in, copy everything from the old HDD onto it, remove old HDD, plug in second new HDD, and keep the other two as backups if the first ones fail" because they're lazy and what I'm doing seems like a lot of work.)
Is RAID 5 the best option here, or would a different type be more beneficial in this case?
I read elsewhere on the forums that you need a certain amount of RAM for every GB worth of storage (in reference to a NAS), as I've got only 8GB of DDR3 available to me (and that's the max available to this motherboard), is this something I should be taking into consideration for a RAID?

Any input you can give would be greatly appreciated. I'm up for just trying things till I come across something that works, but nothing beats experience. (⁎˃ᆺ˂)

Edited January 6, 2018 by Brio
Adding further information and re-addressing reason for post.