I've decided to get this 4-bay drive enclosure or the cheaper non-raid variant.

The most cost-effective thing I can think of is to fill it with four 1.5TB WD Green power drives, running independently for a total of 6TB (5.5TB NTFS).

Or run it in RAID5 and fill it with four 1TB enterprise/raid-edition drives for extra speed and data protection. However, I've heard RAID5 isn't fool proof on rebuilds and having nearly 50% of the space seems like a huge tradeoff. (I'd need to get 1TB drives as I've heard the WD green drives don't work in RAID and I'm never buying Seagate again).

Thoughts? Any opinions would be great.

I don't really need speed so much as space and protection.

There's no reason the Green Power drives wont work in RAID.

You've got to ask yourself the question.... do you care if you lose the data?

If the answer is yes, then I'd either run two of the drives in RAID 1 + 2 drives not in RAID, or run them all in 5. If the answer is no, then I'd just run them all either in JBOD or no RAID at all.

Personally, I only have ~15GB of data I don't want to lose. And even then, if I lost it, it'd just be "*sigh* Well, there's 15GB of shit I don't have to backup. And years of emails I'll never actually look at again."

8x WD10EACS and 4x WD15EADS drives that i own say greenpowers work fine in raid. (8x1TB on a highpoint 2320, and 4x 1.5TB on a highpoint 2300). 4x 1.5TB in raid, your looking at 4.09TB. You loose the space of 1 drive to redundancy. Keep in mind that raid is not a backup solution. I simpily use raid 5 because I love having large volumes, rather than single disks.

Not sure what that enclosure would be like, but for $350, it would be either software raid, or very cheap hardware raid.

Hmm, so if it's a software RAID, will it still work on things that aren't really PC's?
The way I understand it, my cpu cores will be doing all the parity calculation work.

I really want to hook it up to a Western Digital Media Player, which recognises all mass-storage devices.
Will this have trouble reading off a raid, or do you think the enclosure would do all the work for it?

EDIT: Oh yeah, I heard the green powers aren't good for RAID because their aggressive power-savings cause them to drop out of the array, and if two fall out it can result in catastrophic data loss. I do like giant unified volumes though.

http://forums.ncix.com/forums/?mode=showth...4&subpage=1

Looks like it has a cheap hardware raid chipset?

You just want to make sure TLER is set correctly on each drive

Yes I'm familiar with TLER on WD drives.
I won't be setting up in a raid because I just remembered partitions over 2TB need to be formatted with GPT partition style instead of the MBR that NTFS normally uses... so it won't be recognise by any OS that isn't Vista, pretty much.

Which is bad because I was going to mod/marry it to a Western Digital HD Media Player.

I tried talking to WD and asking if they were going to release a firmware update for the Media Player to read GPT-formatted drives (considering that 2TB+ Western Digital drives are on the horizon, it would be ridiculous if their own media player couldn't read them) but all I got back was a standard THIS ARE COMPATABILITY HARD DRIVE LISTS SIR.

Hopefully it will be able to read the four drives seperately with the enclosure acting as a 'usb hub', but tech support refused to answer my question on that as well. Crossing fingers it will work out.

Generally the best thing to do is either have a storage server or run your desktop as a server for your videos. Your player then connects to this over the network. Failing that, I'd go one step up from the enclosure you've specified and get a little NAS, which is the same thing, but you can just mount it using windows filesharing.

Really that is going to provide you all you need, and handle the >2TB stuff internally, rather than you having to worry about it.

I would also recommend getting over your seagate issue, as *all* hard drive manufacturers make dud batches of drives, and all hard drives fail sooner or later, it really doesn't matter. That's why you should use RAID and get drives with decent warranty.

In summary: get four drives and put them in RAID5 in a NAS enclosure, this will provide victory.

for my setup, I'm currently running 5x1.5tb seagate drives in RAID5 on my server in software raid in linux, haven't had any problems.