I know some folks who put together 1TB file servers for < $5K
They used Athlon motherboards and Promise RAID gear
(http://www.promise.com/ATARaid/)
Their controllers seem to be able to do Hot Swap (see the bottom of
their products page)
Of course, the throughput and such depend on lots of things, the CPU
type, NIC, IDE controller, drive type, etc.
If you do SCSI and want hot swap - SCA is the way to go unless you make
the very expensive jump to Fibre Channel.
One key is make sure whatever enclosure you use for the drives has dual
fans and a way to tell if a fan dies - those tiny drive tray fans die
all teh time, but are very important given how hot today's drives get.
If you really want to go all out, for about $100/drive you can get a
drive bay (SCA & IDE) with a built in LCD panel showing +5/+12V
readings, drive temp, fan status, drive activity and alarms if the drive
or fans fail. Pretty slick.
And make sure whatever controlelr you get is supported by your OS! I'm
pretty sure the FastTracks are suported in Linux, but I don't know how well.
Of course, you can build a 1TB fileserver for just over $3K - but then
you have to back it up! :)
Mike
pac@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
Anyone know what makes a good inexpensive TeraByte fileserver?
Specifically looking for something between 1TB and 100TB.
This would run XFS for sure.
I'd like to put together several systems, in both IDE and SCSI version.
1. Is there a decent IDE-raid card that can support over a Terabyte?
Is there such a thing as a hot-swappable IDE raid card?
Whats the fastest thru-put I can expect out of an IDE raid setup?
Does an IDE TB server even make sense?
2. Is SCA the way to go for scsi? What cards, backplanes, drives
can you recommend?
Whats the fastest thru-put I can expect out of an SCSI raid setup?
3. Whats the fastest throughput i can get away with? Gigabit ether?
Is there another interface that makes more sense?
Thanks,
-phil
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| Dr. Philip A. Carinhas | pac@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx |
| Fortuitous Technologies Inc. | http://fortuitous.com |
| Linux Consulting & Training | Tel : 1-512-467-2154 |
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