I have an Asus P5K WS motherboard with a cheap Core 2 Duo CPU (E2140, $70 or so) and one of the cheap SuperMicro 8-port PCI-X SATA cards. That gives you 14 supported SATA ports. Throw 4 GB of RAM into it (~$100) and then either use 500 GB or 750 GB drives. One of the Seagate 750s is down to $155 this week, which puts it close enough to the 500s ($90-120) that it might be worth considering. I threw everything into a Lian Li PC-V2000A Plus II case, which is kind of pricy (compared to cheap PC cases, not compared to STK hardware :-) but holds 12 drives without any problem at all, and 20 drives with a bit of extra hardware. Before drives, the whole system's well under $1k, and it's been working perfectly for months now.
I'm using raidz2 across 8 drives, but if I had it to do again, I'd probably just use mirroring. Unfortunately, raidz2 kills your random read and write performance, and that makes Time Machine really, really slow. I'm running low on space now, and considering throwing another 8 drives into the case in the spring, if I can find a cheap 8-port PCI-E SATA CARD. When that happens, I'll probably try to convert everything to mirroring. Scott On Jan 14, 2008 8:33 AM, Alex <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi, > > I'm sure this has been asked many times and though a quick search didn't > reveal anything illuminating, I'll post regardless. > > I am looking to make a storage system available on my home network. I need > storage space in the order of terabytes as I have a growing iTunes collection > and tons of MP3s that I converted from vinyl. At this time I am unsure of the > growth rate, but I suppose it isn't unreasonable to look for 4TB usable > storage. Since I will not be backing this up, I think I want RAIDZ2. > > Since this is for home use, I don't want to spend an inordinate amount of > money. I did look at the cheaper STK arrays, but they're more than what I > want to pay, so I am thinking that puts me in the white-box market. Power > consumption would be nice to keep low also. > > I don't really care if it's external or internal disks. Even though I don't > want to get completely skinned over the money, I also don't want to buy > something that is unreliable. > > I am very interested as to your thoughts and experiences on this. E.g. what > to buy, what to stay away from. > > Thanks in advance! > > > This message posted from opensolaris.org > _______________________________________________ > zfs-discuss mailing list > zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org > http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss > _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
