What is the best low cost raid configuration for media center

What is the best low cost raid configuration for media center, I am going to buy 3 or 4 500G hdds.

I have three digital tuners and want to be able to record up to three HD signals and be able to watch HD recordings at the same time.

At the moment I am able to record 3 SD channels at once but can't watch any recordings at the same time, but i think this is because of cpu limitations (AMD XP2400)

[logifuse]

Most new motherboards support the main forms of RAID (striping & mirroring). Some also support higher levels.

RAID 5 with 4 drives is probably a good option - in terms of usable volume, you see the contents of 3 or the drives as a single large drive (1.5TB in your case). Basically, the 4th drive is there in case one of the 3 fails & the array can reconfigure itself with little or no data loss.

RAID 0+1 is also a good option with 4 drives. 2 of the drives are striped (work as 1 big drive) & the other 2 mirror that. You only end up with 1TB of usable space, but you have 100% recovery from drive failure.

In terms of recording or watching, hard drive config won't be the limitation - it will be CPU & GPU.

Justin

Thanks for that logifuse i will now hunt down a suitable motherboard, any sugestions for an AMD socket 940 motherboards?

thanks again
Laurens

[noonz]

Hey Laurens

IMHO, dont bother with RAID for VMCE. I used to run mine in RAID 0 (Striped 2x 500GB Samsung HDD's) and found i had better video performance running NO RAID. ie: 2 hard drives seperately.

I'm a system builder & have built more that 1000 PC, of all spec's.
The only reason I would run RAID is to make one big volume out of many HDD's (more than 3 drives RAID 5)

My thoughts that you might be better to get 2x 750gb drives & BTW I used to use Samsung drives, but after having to send more that 10 drives in the past year back to Samsung because of HDD failures, I'm using Seagate drives now

hope this helps
Noonz