Cheapest "High-Quality" RAID 1+0 Array For Home Server?

I want to know if there is a home-based disk array that has 80% of the reliability of an enterprise system at 10% of the cost.

Businesses use RAID 5 and higher, so the answer is no just on the basis of counting up the necessary drives.

But the fact is, if it's important enought to justify RAID, it's also important enough to justify a good controller.  A good RAID controller whether in a NAS or not will run a couple hundred bucks, surely.  But if you lose thousands of dollars of data or irreplaceable pictures on a cheap controller, there's no getting it back (RAID, remember?  It didn't require backup!) and the "budget" model was not a good investment.

Absolutely do software RAID.   Get a used computer, you won't need much, and download one of the open flavors of solaris on it, like omni os.  Using the ZFS filesystem for RAID-n gives you a lot of flexibility, like being able to use any mix & match of disks, multiple RAID levels, online expansion, snapshots, mirrored boot (of course),  apple time machine, SMB, NFS, and so on.

A ZFS-based RAID farm scales into petabytes, has features rivaling external RAID subsystems from EMC.

Rindi, I'm probably going to run Windows 10 Enterprise or Professional on the computer, and the servers will run on VMWare Workstation, so probably my software RAID options are limited.   Windows Server has Dynamic Disks, which I like, but the support for that on non-server Windows versions is spotty at best.   Did that change with Windows 10?

It's also nice to run Windows on "Simple" volumes just because it gives the widest compatibility with third party tools.

Dr Khlan, a few hundred books for the external enclosure is fine.   That seems cheap to me by comparison to enterprise RAID, which is running $2K to $20K for simple boot arrays.  What are my vendor /  model options?

You can run vmware workstation just fine on ZFS software RAID.  I know of sites using THOUSANDS of VMs and hundreds of petabytes worth of disk with this config (obviously lots of computers), but it works quite well.

You might look into rolling either a NAS or RAID subsystem yourself, if you're of a technical bent.  There's an article on it that details one guy's build.

Side note:  There's no need to go SAS.  The newer controllers do up to 8 ports SATA, and are not overly priced on fleabay.

No matter what way you decide to go, remember:  RAID is not a substitute for backup, and does not eliminate the need for doing backups.  e.g.:  If a mouse gets into the enclosure and urinates on the drives, no amount of rebuild will save that RAID set.

dlethe, Linux is great, but to use ZFS I have to become a UNIX administrator.   Too much time required for that.   If I were going to run a huge array of servers, the time requirement to learn UNIX is a cost of business to be compared against licensing costs for proprietary software.   For someone running a few servers at home, it is not worth the time investment.

Dr Klahn, I would be running on a tiny box like this one:
https://www.tinygreenpc.com/fitlet-t.html

I think that takes one mini pci-e slot, not a full card.

I do understand RAID is not a substitute for backup.   And - sometimes - it is not even a backup for hardware failure.   In fact, sometimes it is itself the source of the failure. :)

If you are unwilling to invest in *NIX (perfectly understandable) .. then why not just buy a used server on ebay that is in the HCL list for vmware (if you ever need vmware)?   You won't need latest hardware for a NAS server and used rack mount systems that used to sell for $10K+ can be found for well under $500.   You might even find one with an older windows 2008 license.

Just invest in new disk drives, and make sure if you use a HP server you get disks from HP with the proper firmware.

dlethe, the issue was how to minimize the *energy footprint* of the server.   That tiny server I linked runs with the monitor detached at 15 watts!!!

My main computer these days is a Dell T7600 workstation.  It's great for high end, but to run it 24x7 with virtual machines that thing is sucking down 350 watts.    I want to start to experiment with creating a low energy footprint environment for my non-CPU-intensive computing.

If you want to minimize the energy, then don't do RAID.  Do you need the uptime and stay up 24/7?  If not, you really don't need RAID.  RAID is good for speed, uptime, and redundancy, but not energy savings.  If you just need a redundancy, then you can just back up to a 2nd bootable disk once in a while and you should be fine.  If the first disk fails, just swap it out and get a new 2nd disk for backing up.  For a home system, it's easier if you just Keep It Simple.

serialband, I think two SSDs in an external enclosure that uses no fan for cooling, and uses hardware RAID 1 for redundancy, is not going to take a lot of energy....

You can still make image backups of the simple volume created on a hardware RAID 1, thus implementing your idea for backups.

Most RAID controllers won't support SSD's. OS integrated RAID is a lot better for that. Besides that, and OS Software RAID does load balancing, which means reads from the array is faster.

I can argue it both ways.   I have had cases where software RAID on a boot volume fails and you don't discover it until it is too late.  Generally I like software RAID.

Does any version of Windows 8 or Windows 10 support software RAID, exposed through Dynamic drives in the Disk Manager?  In earlier versions of Windows, all of those features were only in the server version of Windows.   Perhaps Microsoft is exposing the functionality in the Enterprise versions of the workstation production now?

RAID needs you to monitor the array, whether it is OS integrated RAID or hardware RAID. If you don't monitor, you'll be caught by a failed disk...

The Pro and above versions of m$ Desktop OS's have supported RAID since Vista. I'd always recommend Windows 10 Pro rather than Home, not just because of the RAID capability.

With the Home version of Windows 10 you now can also use storage spaces, which is a kind of RAID implementation. But you can't use it for the OS Partition, only for data partitions (Storage spaces are also available with Pro).

It seems that Storage spaces will generally outperform and equivalent conventional form of RAID.

rindi, what Microsoft should do is implement a system gadget that notifies us of the failure of the member of a Software RAID member.  It's certainly an important enough event to justify the notification.   It's just kind of silly that they give you such a powerful capability and then trivialize it by recommending that you "monitor it yourself".    

Probably someone makes a third-party app to implement just such a system gadget notification for failed RAID members.  If someone knows of such an application, please recommend it.

That's very interesting that storage spaces outperforms RAID.   What's the reason for that?   They are optimizing layouts in the duplicates to minimize IO for frequently accessed files?

You can have the system send you email messages about Eventviewer messages. Check the Link below:

http://www.howtogeek.com/69551/how-to-create-your-own-windows-event-log-notification-system/

RAID is not really what you think.  It was designed originally as a way to obtain larger storage capacity more cheaply.  When storage prices dropped, they changed the I from Inexpensive to Independent.  I've never found a 2 disk mirror to be necessarily much more reliable than a single disk in practice.  You still have to replace the disk and if the disks were purchased at the same time, the act of rebuilding can stress it enough that your 2nd disk fails soon after, or even during the rebuild.  It's cheaper and simpler to just replace the disk, and computer system, at appropriate intervals as the system ages.
http://www.smbitjournal.com/2012/05/when-no-redundancy-is-more-reliable/
https://forums.adobe.com/thread/525263

serialband, hardware RAID has saved me so many times in commercial settings that I have a different point of view.   In a perfect world, I would have hardware and software RAID, each for slightly different reasons.   For a small home-based server software RAID alone would be fine.

Hardware RAID is run much more heavily in commercial settings, and that's why they have failures more frequently.  At home, the systems are generally so lightly used that it won't matter so much.  If you have something that will benefit from hardware RAID at home, then, by all means use it.  If you're not running 24/7 processes at home, you probably can run off a single disk and it will still be functional 5-8 years later, depending on the model and brand of the disk and how heavily you've used it.  Generally, I replace the single disk, or prepare a replacement in 3-5 years, since the new disks will have doubled in size by then.  In the past, I had a working 4.7 GB laptop disk for for over 10 years, and a 500 GB disk for over 7 years, because they just weren't that heavily used.

If you want your boot disk to last longer, turn off swap and buy sufficient RAM.  That will extend the life of your disk tremendously.  Swap was only really necessary during that interim time when the OS needed much more RAM than was really affordable.  RAM is sufficiently cheap enough now that, unless the user is running hard core calculations or other memory intensive software, you should have more than enough RAM to cover your operations.  Swap also slows down all your operations.

Oh dear @serialband i fear that a calamity is going to hit your systems anytime soon.

Enterprises run their systems 24/7 but they buy enterprise quality disks that have 100% duty cycle ratings, the fact that they see more disk failures is down to the number of disks they have spinning in their data-centers (ie lots).

Consumer disk like the ones in home PC's have a much lower duty cycle rating, but systems are now becoming 24/7 as homes become more and more part of the IOT.

Just because you dont have many problems with disks doesnt mean other people dont. As one of the storage experts on EE i am forever seeing people who have lost all their college work, their photo collection, their life; due to disk crashes where they do not have any backups and and the lack of a simple mirrorSet (RAID-1) would have protected them

Gerald, as a storage expert do you have any opinion about building a Windows 8 or 10 Pro+ system on an external enclosure connected by Thunderbolt 3 to the computer?   Intel's new NUC mini-computers for 2017 will all feature Thunderbolt 3 connections and I see a few external enclosures that are built for Thunderbolt 3.   I would rather use SATA or SAS since both are well known and tested, but the kinds of low-power draw systems I want to build on generally never have eSATA and have very little expandability for peripheral cards.   Intel's NUC system are about 4 x 4 inches square.

The external connector for the enclosures do not matter all that much.  The internal connectors on the cheaper home enclosures are still SATA.

@Gerald,
That's what backups are for.  RAID is not for recovering from calamity.  Backups are what you use to recover from calamity.  RAID is for speed, uptime and capacity, not backup.  If you need RAID for those 3 at your home, then go for it.  But don't have the illusion that it's supposed to save you from calamity.

Home users that aren't doing much still don't really need RAID.  It's not going to give them much more reliability or data integrity.  Everyone needs backups.  For companies that do need RAID, they still need backups, and they generally need multiple copies.  The reason their RAID disks fail more frequently is because of much heavier usage, even with enterprise quality disks.  Frequently, 2 disks will fail within a few weeks of each other because they came from the same manufacturing batch and they're running at the same duty cycle.

As a general rule, I still recommend a single disk for home and plugging in an external usb disk, or two, to periodically back up.  If you use 2 disks, one should be done weekly, and one should be done more frequently.  That way, the disks aren't kept spinning with the same duty cycle.  Backups are far more important to a typical home user.

I don't know if @westes is a typical home user, but unless you need speed, uptime or capacity, you really still don't need RAID.  If you want to play around with it fine, but multiple external disk backups are generally going to protect your personal data better than any RAID.

After full consideration of my options, I think Rindi's suggestion is the most practical.