Joshua Baker-LePain wrote:
The large SAN vendors usually don't recommend building raid5 sets larger than 6-8 disks, and will stripe or concatenate multiple of those on the typical SAN with 100s of spindles. Myself, I'll stick with RAID10 for anything critical.
Would that I had the money to and still get the space I need. Even doing 2 12 disk RAID6 sets (each with a hot spare) gets you 9TB which is 50% more space for the same money as RAID10.
You are omitting the cost of the raid controller here. For your 12+ ports you don't have much other choice except a dedicated network device. For the size that normal people need - or that you might use on other machines, you might have the option of running raid10 (or 0 + LVM) in software on the motherboard ports plus some dumb $20/port cards and buying several extra drives.