[CentOS] [OT] External RAID storage / NAS

[Gordon McLellan]

Just sharing my 5 cents,

How stringent is your requirement that this be external storage?

My home server (currently at 1.25TB) is using a Super Micro SATA
hot-swap drive cage.  Five drives take up three bays in a mini-server
tower (case has a total of 9 bays).  I have another cage installed,
but no controller for it as of yet.  I have 4 of the 5 drives
connected to onboard SATA and one connected to a pci sata controller.
The boot drive is PATA, and the cdrom is external usb2.  Hot-swap
seems to work ... although I haven't tried to remove a drive hot, I
have added two.  With a custom kernel and recompiling some tools, you
can add hot-growable soft-RAID5 support to Centos, or if you have the
funding, a hardware raid controller would be awesome.

The cages' stock fan isn't very quiet but that's an easy remedy, it's
just a standard 92mm fan.

Gordon