RAID 5 controllers...

[Cova]

Man - I was thinking about selling off a bunch of my 160GB drives that I took out when I upgraded my RAID to 8x 320GB disks, and I was gonna sell them for $50 each.  I wouldn't pay more than $20 for an 80GB drive ($0.25 / GB)

I am not looking at getting anything smaller than 320 drives, but thanks for the offer. My target is to be able to max out the controller at 2TB

As I was saying on MSN the other day - that controller CAN go over 2TB.  Each lun (raid array) has a max capacity of 2TB - with 8 320GB drives you need to use 2 luns to get the maximum space out of RAID 5 (7 disks in raid 5 @ 320GB will max out a single lun).  At 500GB disks I think you'd need to go to 3 lun's.  The attached image is 2 screenshots pasted together - one shows the 2 luns I've presented to windows (virtual disk 0 and 1), and the other part of it shows a single one of the 320GB disks in the array, and how it is divided into 2 parts - both of those raid 5 luns span across all 8 spindles, and I still only have 1 spindle of raid-5 overhead.

[Lazybones]

Don't you loose another drive to redundancy for each lun/array you create?

[Cova]

Don't you loose another drive to redundancy for each lun/array you create?

Yes and no - you lose 1 stripe of each array to parity.  In my case, that means the first virtual disk loses 1/2 of one HD to parity, and the second virtual disk loses 1/2 of one HD to parity.  Overall I've still only lost 1 entire HD worth of capacity.  If I had set it up as say 2 4-disk RAID 5 arrays then yes, you would lose an entire disk to each RAID-5, and would have 2 disks worth of overhead across the entire controller.

[Lazybones]

Interesting, that is very good to know