[thayerg]

I've recently overhauled my home file server which I set up in 2001 and pretty much forgot about. beyond adding a usb wifi adapter earlier this year. I wanted redundancy and enough capacity to do video. Dipping into the market and asking a few knowledgeable people about this I decided to go with

An Adaptec SERIAL ATA RAID 1210SA  controller. Less than $60, it supports two serial ATA hard drives in a RAID 0 or 1 configuration. In RAiD 1 each disk is a mirror of the other, which is a low-cost and simple way to be redundant.

Two seagate 200 gb drives. You can get bigger capacity but that seemed like it would hold me for a while.

A no-name usb 2.0 controller. I wasn't aware that usb 1.1 is actually slower than wfif-g.  But it is.  In case anyone else is struggling with wifi throughput.

An Apple AIrport Express. I wanted this for its ability to output digital audio into my Meridian pre/pro. Which it does, and the elimination of a digital/analog/digital  double conversion increased transparency and airineess significantly.  The downside is that bad mp3s now sound truly heinous by comparison.

Anyway these are all pretty cheap ways of putting consumer-grade hardware to use in audiophile applications.

[Jay S]

Dumb question, but how do you connect your Airport Express to your Meridian pre/pro?

[Levi]

I've recently overhauled my home file server which I set up in 2001 and pretty much forgot about. beyond adding a usb wifi adapter earlier this year. I wanted redundancy and enough capacity to do video. Dipping into the market and asking a few knowledgeable people about this I decided to go with

An Adaptec SERIAL ATA RAID 1210SA  controller. Less than $60, it supports two serial ATA hard drives in a RAID 0 or 1 configuration. In RAiD 1 each disk is a mirror of the other, which is a low-cost and simple w ...

You cannot go wrong with either Adaptec or Promise cards.  What server software are you running?  If you decide to go with RAID-1, I would suggest you get a spare HDD with same capacity in case the mirror is broken and you'd like to restore the RAID 1 configuration.  I am not sure if you save money when you use RAID 1 because you loose one disk e.g 2x200GB HDD = @200GB total - overhead.  If you use RAID 0 which is stripe, then you gain space 2x200GB HDD = 400GB HDD stripped.  The downside is if you loose 1 drive on a RAID 0 configuration you go back to your tape backup.  That is if you do have backup.  So my suggestion is that no matter what RAID configuration you take, please make sure you have a backup system in place.  RAID 1 adds redundancy and your data are safe.  RAID 0 no redundancy but adds performance as it writes accross multiple HDD.   So for your video editing scenario, SATA RAID-1 2x200GB HDDs would be the best way to go.  

I don't really like the sound quality of MP3.  I have an iPod and I capture music in .wav form.  I think you will like the sound quality much better than MP3 even if it's ripped at 192Khz.  That is if you have the space.   You will see big difference specially if you connected it to your High-end system.

Let's see if you get a Netgear WGT624 wireless router/switch and a matching netgear wireless card, you can go as fast as 108Mbps!  It is using 802.11g technology with it's own proprietary acceleration feature.

My .02- Levi

[thayerg]

Not a dumb question.  You use a mini-optical to toslink connector. Voila--digital signal from source to pre-out.

[thayerg]

for a low-end home server RAID 1 is cost effective. True, RAID 5 lets you use more disk capacity but it needs at least 3 disk drives and the more expensive controller. Not really consumer grade, although given a little time...

[Levi]

for a low-end home server RAID 1 is cost effective. True, RAID 5 lets you use more disk capacity but it needs at least 3 disk drives and the more expensive controller. Not really consumer grade, although given a little time...

Home use...RAID 1 should be ok.  It's inexpensive.

If you like ultimate in performance and redundancy, RAID 5 gives you both redundancy and performance.  Don't forget, RAID 1 only gives you redundancy.  If you really like peformance and redundancy, you can combine RAID 0 and RAID 1.  Depending on your card, the SMART ARRAY 5300 series you can combine RAID 0, 1, 0+1, 5, Advanced Data Guarding (ADG) .  That's a minimum of 7 drives.  This type of controller cards can ultimately span and move RAID stripped size on the fly etc.  The 5300A is a cluster friendly card as well.

Just my .02- Levi

[viggen]

I've been thinking about putting together a hifi quality pc music server.  I know very little about raid but do understand it improves data transfer integrity.  From reading the threads above, it seems you have to use raid 5 for implementing high performance music server?  

I want to throw a bunch of 80 gig note book drives into an enclosure (pc and amd 64 based) with raid, usb out to an usb dac probably wavelength cosecant, then to hifi.

[8thnerve]

I want to throw a bunch of 80 gig note book drives into an enclosure (pc and amd 64 based) with raid, usb out to an usb dac probably wavelength cosecant, then to hifi.

Careful, notebook drives are famous for being slow and noisy, two things you want to avoid in an audio PC.  The Seagate drives as far as I know are the quietest.  Check out endpcnoise.com for some examples of quiet parts.

[viggen]

8th nerve, thanks for the link.  More stuff for me to research.  However, maybe someone can please support 8th nerve on this if I am wrong, but notebook drives, I think, are more quiet than ATA drives?  Supposedly, the good notebook drives are suspended to prevent head damage during impact and would alleviate vibration and harmonic resonance.  I THINK this would contibute to less jitter.  Just deducing... again

On another note, with RAID, I thought an array of notebook discs even with their low RPM can be configured to be faster or atleast comporably as fast as ultra ata.  Plus, they generate a lot less heat, so you can pack in more drives per enclosure.  Oh, higher RPM inherently generate more heat and harmonic resonance as well.

I was part of a marketing team for a 3rd party fujitsu 2.5" drive storage enclosure solution when serial ata was first coming out.  I sorta slept through the meetings though... my GAWD Fujitsu engineers are the most boring (*#%#$.

[Levi]

8th nerve, thanks for the link.  More stuff for me to research.  However, maybe someone can please support 8th nerve on this if I am wrong, but notebook drives, I think, are more quiet than ATA drives?  Supposedly, the good notebook drives are suspended to prevent head damage during impact and would alleviate vibration and harmonic resonance.  I THINK this would contibute to less jitter.  Just deducing... again

On another note, with RAID, I thought an array of notebook discs even with their low RPM can b ...

Noisy?  I am using 15K RPM SCSI HDDs and they are noisy.  They whine when you power them up.   I don't use them for Audio.

I am not familiar with USB RAID5 card or IDE/SATA RAID5 card.  Reliability, functionality and feature set could be an issue.  If you can find a good IDE/SATA RAID5 card, you can then find a NOTEBOOK/LAPTOP HARD DRIVE CONVERTER 44-40 PIN IDE BRACKET KIT and connect it to your IDE RAID5 card.  Install the HDDs inside the case.
Image from pccables.com


Configure your notebook HDDs as you wish.  

RAID5 advantage:

1)Increase your storage capacity.
2)Increase read and write transfer speeds.
3)Redundancy/storage protection.  You could loose up to 1 HDD.  If you can configure 1HDD as global spare is better.

RAID 5 disadvantage:
1)Higher cost of operation.
2)HDDs needs monitoring.

Here is a good site for understanding Levels of RAID

picture of RAID5 from Tom's hardware


-Levi