OK, so far so good. I built it, it starts up, no problem. Now, I'm already being psychologically hit by the number of drives I need because of all the redundancies. On one hand, i want to say screw the redundancies, but I learned my lesson on that 15 years ago when I lost some data I thought I'd never lose because of those damned deathstars from hitachi. So I'm sticking to the plan!
So here's my experience with storage spaces so far. With storage spaces (and probably other similar systems, this is my first time with them) there's a hierarchy to the storage organization. it works like this:
bunch of physical disks --> storage pools --> virtual disks --> (volumes?)
I don't get the volumes, I don't know if I need them. I guess I do, I'll find out.
My plan is to create two pools...one for the live, working files...and another pool strictly to backup the first one. Within each pool, I'm going to use the mirroring option in storage spaces. So this halves my drive capacity. And since I'm backing the pool up, I'm essentially quartering my usable physical disk space. Which is annoying since I'm now quadrupling my cost!!
So I initially thought I had plenty of space and drives, and I guess now I feel I'm quickly running out. I think I mentally was prepared for one level of redundancy, not two. Oh well.
i wasn't planning on getting an additional expansion card for more sata ports, but I may have to now. The 8 ports on the motherboard are full.