Hello,
I purchased the following RAID 5 controller card: http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=150425387222&ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT#ht_2269wt_846
I want to know if I can setup the WD20EARS drives in a RAID 5 configuration using the above card? I’m not to fussed with performance, as it will purely be used as a media file store. I don’t want to pay for the more expensive RAID drives - for a home user these are not viable.
Furthermore, does the 4096 sector size get in the way at all with a RAID 5 configuration? If so, I will opt for the older WD20EADS drives instead (I currently have 2x1TB versions of these drives running in a RAID 0 configuration for over a year now).
Thanks in advance.
This drive (WD20EARS) reports that it’s sector size is 512 bytes faking OS / RAID controller. So… I don’t think you will have some problem here. Just care about aligning partitions to 4k sector even if you don’t care about performance so much. There is no such thing like “bad good performance” if you get me 
This card… It looks to me like software RAID card. It’s so cheap. Linux can do these software RAIDs without any additional hardware and they are much more stable, than those provided by fRAIDs (software RAIDs, fake RAIDs). There is no Linux in supported OSes there. I think you should use this card just as additional SATA ports.
However, if you will use Windows on your server, then you will need to use this “RAID” to make it…
