How to build a cheap and fast RAID 5 NAS

An exceptional article from Tom's Network.

August 2nd, 2006 at 11:00am — Comments: (2) — By: Jonathan Danylko — Tags: HowTo

One of the most common sayings in the technology industry is that you can never have enough memory or hard drive space. How true, how true.

With small businesses, the more hard drive space you have, the more likely one or more of your hard drives will head South on you. That's where RAID technology comes into play.

With RAID technology, if you lose one or more of your hard drives, you simple swap out the bad drives and install a new one and your system continues on as if nothing ever happened. This is definitely a life saver for small businesses, but requires a lot of money up front for a decent setup.

Tom's Networking posted an article on how to build a cheap and fast RAID 5 NAS (Network Accessible Storage) and I believe if you have a powerful enough PC laying around in your supply room, I seriously think you can create a solid RAID 5 system for under $400. as opposed to almost $1,000.

In between working full time, working with clients, spending time with the family, this will be my next project to create a NAS setup for my home network (after I finish building my media PC).

Stay tuned. I may post my results from both projects.