Rack mounted RAID5 for ~ 1 TB storage

[aychamo]

Hey guys

What do you think would be the best solution for setting up a rack mounted RAID5 for ~ 1 TB of storage

What I'm thinking is a rack mounted computer case with a precent decent computer in it with gigabit ethernet. I'd like to have the computer with it's storage as a stand alone entity so that I could just hook it up as a network share.

Hot-swappable would be great. Perhaps 5x300gig HD, set up in RAID5 to give 4x300 = 1.2 TB. Does anyone have any suggestions for gear, etc?

Thank you kindlyl

 

[graphic7]

Hey guys

What do you think would be the best solution for setting up a rack mounted RAID5 for ~ 1 TB of storage

What I'm thinking is a rack mounted computer case with a precent decent computer in it with gigabit ethernet. I'd like to have the computer with it's storage as a stand alone entity so that I could just hook it up as a network share.

Hot-swappable would be great. Perhaps 5x300gig HD, set up in RAID5 to give 4x300 = 1.2 TB. Does anyone have any suggestions for gear, etc?

Thank you kindlyl

Well, there's lots of options.

Ultra320 SCSI, Ultra160 SCSI (if you want to save some cash), and Fibre Channel if your in between. You can pick up a Sun A5200 loaded with drives (1 TB total) and an Emulex Fibre card to hook up to a system that will be doing the file serving and RAID 5 for a relatively cheap amount, definitely under $1.5k.

Can you give some sort of price range?

Also, are you willing to go for software or hardware volume management?

SATA is always an option, too, if you're willing to sacrifice speed and reliability.

 

[anti_crank]

For a R-mounted system like you suggested, I'd generally agree with what graphic7 said. Of course, if you really want to go budget, you can always just pick up some of either the Maxtor 300GB or Seagate's 400GB SATA drives and do it that way.

 

[graphic7]

If you do plan on going the SATA route, buy larger disks so that the array will have less disks. The reason for this is that the MTBF (mean time between failures) is much less on SATA and IDE drives than their SCSI or fibre counterparts. The reason the MTBF is important is because it tells you how long it takes the drive to fail on average, of course. On a side note, the more disks you typically have in an array, the MTBF (because of heat and vibration) tends to drop. A drive might qualify for 700,000 hours; however, if you create an array with 1000 of those drives, you might be expecting 1 drive failure every month or so.