Since it's been two years since my last raid cost analysis, I figured it was about time to do another one.

Goals:

• increase my storage. Currently 1000GB using raid5 (3 x 500GB drives)
• preferably only use 2 drives as it costs money to spin an extra drive
• not spend too much

I'd have preferred going with only 2 drives (raid1) but the cost per GB is just too high. Possible choices are in green, but I went with the blue one. All prices from the only computer store in Calgary worth mentioning, Memory Express.

Some interesting things I noticed from two years ago, the cost per gig is much more linear than it used to be. You no longer have to pay a crazy premium to get the biggest (or smallest) drive available.

Another thing I noticed, look at the colors in orange. You can build a 2 drive 2TB array for $420 or a 3 drive 2TB array for $261. Kinda a no brainer there even if a 2 drive array is nicer to have. Also note, you can have a 1.5TB array for $250 or for an extra $11 upgrade it to 2TB, an extra %33. Also a no brainer if you've got the room for that extra drive.

For fun I also included some solid state drives, these are just the drive costs, having that many controllers in a custom enclosure would probably cost an extra… lots. The awesome Intel drives are extremely price competitive.

In the end I ended up buying another 500GB drive and just adding it to my existing array. A couple of simple Linux commands later (much later, it took approx 10 hours to rebuild the array but the array was available during that time) and I had lots of breathing room. I have only fanboy good things to say about LVM

I also decided to replace my boot drive and backup raid5 array (why have my backups on a raid5 array? Because I already had the array, it was what I was using before my upgrade in raid costs 1) with a 1TB Western Digital Green drive. So all together I replaced four drives with one and added 500GB of space doing it. I also added a 500GB drive to my existing array, all for $150. Not too bad.

I've also started sharing out an LVM partition as an iSCSI target for my OSX Time Machine. More info here

Note to any Linux users out there who are deciding to change their root file system, you REALLY need to run:

mkinitrd --fstab=/etc/fstab initrd-`uname -r` `uname -r`
mv initrd-`uname -r`.img /boot

That little nugget of info would have saved me more hours than I'd admit to.