Topic: Recycling hardware for a RAID box?

[rigpimp]

I know this topic has been beaten to death but the time has come for some massive storage upgrades.  I have at least 12 TB of internals, externals and about 1000 DVD's of SHN and FLAC files that I want to get into a stable storage system for listening and sharing and redundant protection. 

I do not mind dropping loot but I need to figure out what I can use from old hardware I currently have.

P4 Sony RB30 running Media Center
Dell Poweredge 1600 server with a SCSI card (6 drive bays) Has Server 2003 on mirrored 74GB drives already
(old) LARGE handmade PC Antec P180, Q6600  (6 Drive bays)
(current) LARGE handmade PC NZXT Switch 810Antec P180, Q6600  (6+ Drive bays)

A ton of other power supplies, optical drives, etc.

I am open to ideas?  including scrapping it all an going from scratch.  My preference is to recycle something first and rebuild as opposed to wasting crap.

[phanophish]

I played around with FreeNAS & OpenFiler among others and none of them wound up being very stable when running ZFS.  I really wanted something with easy expandability from a storage perspective.  I finally gave up and bought a Drobo FS.  It just works.  No Drama, no hassle. 

[H₂O]

Do not rely on RAID for backup purposes (you will still need a copy of anything you put on the RAID system).

RAID systems can and do fail and alot of times in manners that all data on the array is lost.

[rjp]

I played around with FreeNAS & OpenFiler among others and none of them wound up being very stable when running ZFS.

I wouldn't recommend using ZFS unless you have a motherboard that supports ECC RAM (and ECC RAM is installed). Without ECC, ZFS' data integrity features are meaningless. Also, ZFS is very RAM-hungry; I wouldn't build a ZFS system with less than 4GB, and more is better.

FWIW, my 4GB box running OpenIndiana (the direct descendant of OpenSolaris) has been rock-solid.

[phanophish]

I played around with FreeNAS & OpenFiler among others and none of them wound up being very stable when running ZFS.

I wouldn't recommend using ZFS unless you have a motherboard that supports ECC RAM (and ECC RAM is installed). Without ECC, ZFS' data integrity features are meaningless. Also, ZFS is very RAM-hungry; I wouldn't build a ZFS system with less than 4GB, and more is better.

FWIW, my 4GB box running OpenIndiana (the direct descendant of OpenSolaris) has been rock-solid.

I had I think 6GB of RAM, but it was not ECC.  I just fought issues with FreeNAS not working properly and always throwing errors they only popped up when building a ZFS volume.  My dilemma was I want something that offers the flexible growth (simply pop in more/larger drives and the NAS manages the parity and rebuilds what is essentially the RAID set)  that the Drobo does.  I gave up and spent the $$ on a actual Drobo, saving a few bucks just was not worth the time and frustration.