As much as I would want to upgrade to that card, it unfortunately is out of my price range.
Budgeting... *sigh*
No problem, I understand.
Anyways, I had a look inside the G5 (didn't have time to take measurements), and I'm pretty confident I can squeeze in a four-drive bracket, maybe with a fan - although the design challenge is getting it to fit in the top of the case. Originally it looked daunting, since at first I was considering an enclosure reminiscent of something found in a PC case (metal on four sides). But then I found myself wondering, "why do I need metal on top?" I still need to draw all of it out, but I am fairly confident that the top of the bracket (the bracket will replace the optical drive) does not need to be assembled at all, just the sides so that the HDDs can be screwed in. If this is kind of confusing, I'll try and post a picture tomorrow of the basic idea, if I can.
If I understand you correctly, you want to make a sheet metal U bracket. It should work, assuming you have the clearances needed for 4 HDD's.
However, viewing the compatibility list on the highpoint website, two hard drives that I was considering were the
Fujitsu MBA3073RC and the
HITACHI HUS153073VLS300. Both are low-capacity, speedy drives (or at least I was under the impression). Anyrate, what would be the downside of using these drives in my array, if any? From the HCL, no NTQ, but I was not under the impression it would help with large writes...
I haven't checked Highpoint's site, but I presume you meant both drives you were interested in won't work. (The sentence looks cut off in mid thought).
As it's a SAS card, and that it's based on Areca's 1680ix8, I'd recommend using enterprise drives. SAS has a habit of being picky about SATA drives, and Areca's seems to have issues with consumer models. You might also want to look at Areca's HDD Compatibility List (.pdf), as it might give a good cross reference, and offer up another potential drive or two. You won't really find much in the way of consumer drives that work on the SAS models.
The reasoning for staying away for both drives not on the list, and consumer models in general, is that they have a habit of dropping out. VERY OFTEN, rendering the array unreliable, and effectively useless. A great deal of this has to do with the fact the TLER values are different than those in a RAID drive (enterprise/nearline). Consumer units use 0,7 (seconds), and enterprise uses 0,0 s. (It has to do with recovery).
In the case of WD, they have a utility that allows the user to change these values. Rather handy, as you can take GP (Green) drives, change the values, and get a very large capacity for a smaller array. On the cheap. But it's not guaranteed to work for all controllers. I just happen to have done this before with a decent track record.
I've never found such utilities for other makers, including Seagate, Hitachi, Samsung, or Fujitsu.
I guess they figure if people can do this, they wouldn't sell as many of thier enterprise models).
I've had good luck with WD's and Seagate's over the years, and currently use WD3202ABYS on the Areca for SATA drives for the obvious reason: cost.
I usually shut NCQ/TCQ = Disabled. Most of the experiments I run haven't shown it to be of benefit (definitely on the Areca's), and it can cause instability in the array. Areca's support section suggests leaving it disabled as well.
