Hey jt201,
Just a word of caution - make sure you have good status and activity LEDs on each of your 8 drives in your D.I.Y. server. It will save you when problems happen. I had a nice 8 drive hand-built server, which ran like a banshee until one drive went bad, and I simply couldn't tell which drive was the bad one. Linux seemed to hand out device nodes to drives in a different order than the order the BIOS saw them in. So I couldn't tell. I had to migrate all data off the server, and destroy the array, just to deal with a dead drive.
That was the day I went and got my first ReadyNAS.
Just a word of caution - make sure you have good status and activity LEDs on each of your 8 drives in your D.I.Y. server. It will save you when problems happen. I had a nice 8 drive hand-built server, which ran like a banshee until one drive went bad, and I simply couldn't tell which drive was the bad one. Linux seemed to hand out device nodes to drives in a different order than the order the BIOS saw them in. So I couldn't tell. I had to migrate all data off the server, and destroy the array, just to deal with a dead drive.
That was the day I went and got my first ReadyNAS.
