tealnet wrote:
Thanks for the reply. Sorry for the lack of details, should have been more thorough in my original question.
This is going to be primarily for storage/safe-keeping of data, mostly multimedia files. Throughput isn't terribly important. But it will be connected to a gigabit network and it would be nice to take advantage of that speed. We need something that is going to be very reliable. We wanted to go with a RAID array so that a drive failure wouldn't result in the loss of irreplaceable work. There will be no other backup, this will be the primary storage. Expansion is not a big deal as we can just build more boxes as the need for more storage arises. However, if there were a more cost effective way to add storage to one large array later on, I would certainly be interested, but it's not mandatory. I figured a system of this size would probably cost $5-$10k just in hardware but I've never built anything of this scale before. Basically we just need a replacement for backing up data to external USB drives. It's only going to be a couple computers dumping data to it over the network, so we're not talking about anything super fancy here. We basically just need the equivalent of an extremely large external USB drive, but with better reliability.
Any recommendations or feedback you can provide is greatly appreciated.
If you plan on not having some sort of backup then I will tell you that you may loose data at some point. Though RAID will give you some measure of protection from the loss of data due to a drive failure there is a trade off. That is that your chances of a failure multiply with the number of drives in that array. IE: If an array is made up of 10 drives that have an MTBF of 600,000 hours each, the actual MTBF of the array now is 60,000 hours. Add in the MTBF of the controller and the other parts and failure is almost a certain thing sooner or later. Did I mention that you really should be buying drives of the same type and model but from different lots? This can have a large effect on the MTBF of your array. What I am getting at here is that if the data is irreplaceable then you better be thinking about RAID6 and a mirror to another array with incremental backups at regular intervals.
That said, you can find most all of what you need on Ebay. I would recommend a server with at least two 8X PCIe slots, preferably more so you can add cards as needed to expand each array. The better controllers have battery backup for the write cache on the card, this will be a must for you. Also consider that some of the better cards also support SATA port expanders. These allow four drives to be addressed by one of the SATA channels on the controller. IE; In theory you could have a 24 port SATA RAID card with up to 96 drives off of it. Performance would not be to bad but you don't really care much about that. There are cases out there that will hold allot of drives, it just comes down to how much you are willing to spend for this. The other option is to simply add controllers and drives as needed up to the limit of the MB.
The area you are venturing into is fought with pitfalls and there are always issues to be dealt with. Some times they are very technical and one must ask ones self how much learning are you will to do. A poorly implemented infrastructure can be a constant cause of problems.
Mike