> If you can afford it and this is for real work, you may want to
> consider something like a Network Appliance Filer. It will be
> a lot more robust and quite a bit faster than rolling your own
> array. The downside is they are quite expensive. I believe the
> folks at Raidzone make a "poor man's" canned array that can
> stuff almost a terabyte in one box and uses cheaper IDE disks.
I priced the netapps - they are ridiculously expensive. They estimated 1tb
at about $60-100K - thats the size of our budget and we have other things
to get.
What I was thinking was a good machine with a 64bit pci bus and/or
multiple buses.
And A LOT of external enclosures.
> If you can't afford either of these solutions, 73gig Seagate
> Cheetahs are becoming affordable. Packing one of those
> rackmount 8 bay enclosures with these gets you over 500gb
> of storage if you just want to stripe them together. That
> would likely be VERY fast for reads/writes.
> The risk is that you'd lose everything if one of the disks crashed.
this isn't much of a concern.
The plan so far was this (and this plan is dependent on what advice I get
from here)
Raid0 for the read-only data (as its all on tape anyway)
Raid5 or Raid1 for the writable data on a second scsi controller.
Does this sound reasonable?
I've had some uncomfortable experiences with hw raid controllers -
ie: VERY poor performance and exbortitant prices.
My SW raid experiences under linux have been very good - excellent
performance and easy setup and maintenance. (well virtually no maintenance
:)
-sv
