I need to add some storage to the OS X Server I'm going to be migrating to at home. I wanted a RAID-5, but the prices are a little out of reach for personal use.
I want enough space to make it worth my while (at least 500 Gigs) and redundancy/fault tolerance is a concern... this rig will be holding backups of important stuff from my other Macs, as well as being a repository for quite a bit of data. Failing RAID-5, I want to have four identical drives in a RAID 0+1 configuration, which will give me one large volume that is mirrored. Which reminds me, can Tiger's Disk Utility do that sort of thing, stripe drives A & B and C & D and then mirror volumes AB and CD? Tape backups aren't cheap either, so I plan to connect an external FireWire drive occasionally to back up my most critical data.
Anyway, I've been doing quite a bit or research w/r/t four-drive enclosures vs. putting two drives in the Mac and two in an enclosure, hot swap enclosures vs. shut-down-and-disassemble type enclosures, build-your-own vs. prebuilt enclosures, etc. I like the hot swappability and drive trays with the LCDs that give a little feedback on drive health, since those are features I like about RAID-5.
Lately I've been looking at multi-drive enclosures and like this one. I plan to throw in four OEM 250GB or 300GB SATA drives from NewEgg, and use a FirmTek SeriTek/1VE4 card in the server (a dual G4/450) to drive it. Total for everything comes to just over $900, including shipping.
Before I pull the trigger on ordering all this stuff, I'd like to collect a few opinions to see if there's a better way to go about it. Does anyone know of a reputable dealer selling barebones hardware RAID-5 units, or have any other suggestions?