patseguin Wrote:Thanks for the advice. I think you're right about why I switched. I was willing to give FreeNAS a try but now I'm thinking about just putting Windows 7 back on it and either going back to my LSI RAID card or maybe even go with Windows 7 software RAID1. What do you think? My motherboard supports up to RAID10 and it was working fine but gollum told me that is the absolute worst way to go.
As long as you keep in mind there's no "right" answer unless you spend thousands on a controller, chassis and spindles then you can take all the advice offered on face value - it's all meant to be helpful.
Again, it's difficult to tell exactly what card you have but rest assured, the LSI's are popular and well supported. Would they be recommended to run Wikipedia's server farm? Possibly not but then you're not doing that either.
I think your controller will be 100% fine for your needs.
Disks are next, you picked up some Barracuda's which in my opinion are much, much better than the Green Editions but unfortunately are not fully RAID compliant disks.
"Green" disks are "bad" for (hardware) RAID arrays because the do really bad things with the power profiles and controllers can see a disk as faltering.
"Desktop" disks are "not ideal" for (hardware) RAID because they may not have TLER however the problem is actually worse in reverse (using a TLER disk on a destop without a RAID controller is "bad"). But the second problem with desktop drives is that they assume they are in an array of 1 disk or RAID 0 JBOD and they apply their own error correction - this is "really bad" when the RAID controller is meant to be looking after error detection/correction.
"RAID" disks are required for proper performance, resilience and reliability but they're more expensive. In the Seagate range this is the "Constellation" set (you don't need the 'ES' edition).
Brand is your choice, I prefer WD's and they call their ones "RAID Edition".
Simply put, if you want redundancy in your array then use RAID5, if you don't want redundancy then use RAID0. Both should give you oodles of performance, don't worry about 4/6/10/50 etc.
Bung that all in an I'm pretty sure Windows will run it like a champ. Especially since they have a very, very fast bus/interface.