The RAID XL (a modified RAID 3) is amazing for personal, and small file server use. It's much faster than RAID5 as long as you don't need it to access a million files a minute like a web server. For a personal file server or multimedia box, it's perfect.
My experience with it: I have the 5 port Raid XL card (http://www.netcell.com/) with 3 200gig WD drives attached to it all running as a media drive in my main comp. Yeild is a 400 gig array with parity. It has sustained throughput over 75megs/sec for files over 1 meg each.
Due to user error (an id10t error), I unplugged a drive and messed up the array. It simply gave me a warning that one drive was no longer usable and needed to be replaced. No data loss, no slow down. I knew the drive hadn't been damaged so I reinserted it into the array. It asked if I should use the unassigned drive to complete the array and I said Yes.
Just for fun I benchmarked the system before, during and after rebuild and it was almost exactly the same each time. Even when rebuilding, I was able to use the array for a large rendering project that was due the next morning. The drive remained perfetly usable even when it was being rebuilt. (all with cheap drives too!)
Just for fun (never trust technology completely) I back up most of the files on that array to an old PIII box with a 250 gig drive in it.
Hope this helps, it sure has helped me!
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The RAID XL (a modified RAID 3) is amazing for personal, and small file server use. It's much faster than RAID5 as long as you don't need it to access a million files a minute like a web server. For a personal file server or multimedia box, it's perfect. My experience with it: I have the 5 port Raid XL card (http://www.netcell.com/) with 3 200gig WD drives attached to it all running as a media drive in my main comp. Yeild is a 400 gig array with parity. It has sustained throughput over 75megs/sec for files over 1 meg each. Due to user error (an id10t error), I unplugged a drive and messed up the array. It simply gave me a warning that one drive was no longer usable and needed to be replaced. No data loss, no slow down. I knew the drive hadn't been damaged so I reinserted it into the array. It asked if I should use the unassigned drive to complete the array and I said Yes. Just for fun I benchmarked the system before, during and after rebuild and it was almost exactly the same each time. Even when rebuilding, I was able to use the array for a large rendering project that was due the next morning. The drive remained perfetly usable even when it was being rebuilt. (all with cheap drives too!) Just for fun (never trust technology completely) I back up most of the files on that array to an old PIII box with a 250 gig drive in it. Hope this helps, it sure has helped me!