750GB (or larger) fault-tolerant storage solution <$600

[OtakuCODE]

750GB (or larger) fault-tolerant storage solution <$600

I'd like to have at least 750GB of contiguous storage... speed doesn't matter much. Fault tolerance is a requirement, though. That's a lot of data and I don't want to lose it to a crash. The options I've considered:

NAS - Ridiculously overpriced and underperforming

LaCie Bigger Disk external 1TB drive - No fault tolerance and manufactured with very poor quality... lots of reports of drive crashes in the first 24 hours.

The option I find the most possible at this point: Home-built RAID5 array. 4x 250GB drives (preferrably SATA) and Highpoint or similar RAID5 controller... should be fast, fault-tolerant and relatively cheap. It almost hits my price point. Almost.

So the deal I really need is a 250GB SATA drive (rotational speed does not matter) for $100 with NO rebates... or a crazy rebate with a limit of 4 per household I guess... because I need 4 identical drives. A deal on a SATA RAID5 PCI controller wouldn't be bad either...

 

[Kage_]

What you could might also consider is an IDE RAID setup. Our IS department has one and it's pretty cool. It uses two IDE channels w/ two drives on each. It's a hardware device that performs the raid function w/ the IDE drives. I'm not sure on the cost or availability though.

Kage_

 

[OtakuCODE]

That's what I'm talking about. I'd only really prefer SATA drives to ATA100 or ATA133 because the cabling with ATA100 and ATA133 drives gets to be quite cumbersome and the SATA stuff is much easier to work with. And they don't cost much more, either. A 4-port controller card that will do RAID5 is about $150-$160. The issue, really, is the drives. I need to find a place where I can get 250GB drives for at or under $100 apiece that will let me buy 4 of them at once. IE, no "limit 1 per customer" rebate deals...