[rescue] Any Minneapolis area listers ?

[Magnus]

Lionel Peterson wrote:

> Whee! If they really need 2 TB, I'd suggest 4x 750 GB SATA drives in a RAID5 array
[dude fix your MTA please]

Now onto the question...

This is a good start but more spindles is better.  Besides being faster, 
it will save you more money.  Just looking at newegg.com...

750GB SATA drives $339.99 ea. = $0.45 per GB
500GB SATA drives $149.99 ea. = $0.30 per GB
400GB SATA drives $109.99 ea. = $0.27 per GB

I looked at some smaller drives and 400GB seems to be the best bang for 
the buck right now just in terms of raw disk.

4 x 750GB RAID5 (~2250GB usable) = $1359.96
5 x 500GB RAID5 (~2000GB usable) = $749.95
6 x 400GB RAID5 (~2000GB usable) = $659.94

More drives will mean bigger enclosure, better controller(s), etc. so 
it's not quite as direct as the cost of the drives themselves.  But 
using 400GB drives instead of 750GB drives clearly saves a TON of money.

I would *very highly suggest* adding *at least* one more drive to 
whatever combination you end up buying and keep it around as your 
"spare".  When the inevitable drive failure comes, you might find 
yourself in a position of not being able to procure a drive with the 
same disk geometry/capacity as what you have in the RAID making recovery 
that much more challenging.

Doing this with Ultra320 SCSI or SAS will be relatively untouchable to 
someone on a tight budget.  SATA really is the way to go here and will 
yield admirable performance.