Fault-Tollerant Terabyte Storage Server for cheap

[Bookmage]

Came across this nifty worklog while googling terabyte server.

http://www.finnie.org/terabyte/


It's semirecent and within good budget. I was just thinking about how else I could configure my 8 x 200GB into a TB w/o plopping down 400$ on a 3ware. I haven't seen any reviews of the Highpoint RocketRaid 454 card anywhere and wonder if anyone has any experience with it.
If the card does perform decently, it would give u 8 independant channels for around 200$. Software striping two RAID 5 arrays does sound appealing too.

Opinions?

 

[Adcadet]

what options do we have for SATA drives these days?

 

[LunarMist]

Sometimes cheap RAID 5 is less fault tolerant with respect to data loss than independent drives. You'll still be running regular backups, correct?

 

[Bookmage]

There are more SATA Raid controllers on the market now. However, the $/GB for SATA is still more than IDE. The only real life reason for SATA would probably be for the longer, thinner cables.
Highpoint makes an 8 port SATA RAID card for around 200$. LSI also has a 6 port for around 300$.

If one of the drives fails on the RAID 50, the striped array would be in degraded mode, but still function. If a 2nd drive on the 2nd RAID 5 array failed, than the array would still be function. From a theoretical best case scenario.

I'm almost positive the the Highpoint Rocketraid 454 is a software raid 5 card, but the performance benchmarks using Bonnie wasn't too bad.
For a storage server accessed over a 10/100/1000 Mbps network, the performance should be adequate.

So anyone have any experience with it?