[geeks] The Idea(tm)... Homebrew Terabytes Cheap

[Jody Stephens]

Here is the deal. Currently we have about 5 DDS-2 tape 
drives, media we get for ~$15 a pop. Problem, we have
to keep all of the tapes for 1 year, after that we
keep month beginnings and month ends. Each machine does
about 2GB uncompressed. 

So we've been trying to think of way to cut costs (we
seem to spend >$5000 yearly for tapes including about a 
%10 failure rate). Some of the things I've looked at are

1. Buying cheap IDE drives, writing to them, pulling them
storing them. Actually this works out to about the same
price, but we get better reliabilty (in theory), quicker
backups and restores. But we have to deal with HD's, which
are not exactlly durable. So that is out.

2. CD-R. Alright except each machine would span more than
1 disc, creating problems if one fails. And dealing with
all those CD's doesn't sound like fun.

3. Optical. Too bloody expensive.

Sooo... My thought.
10 IDE plex at ($460 each)
80 WD 40GB drives ($130 each)
put these in a group of rackmount cases.
Buy a decent machine with a bunch of memory.
Buy a couple of good SCSI cards.

Put these together with Linux (or OS of choice) and
a couple of big slices. Bingo. For less than $20,000
I just got 3.2TB max (probably would be less as 
I would want to make some hot spares and such). That
gets me ~3yrs data. If I'm feeling crazy, I put together
another one at the other store and let them mirror 
(safe from fire).

This wouldn't really need to be a high performance beast,
as data would basically be dribbling in. But I guess with
more busess and some striping it could be a decent performer.
If there is a way to get some drives to sleep, then power 
consumption would drop dramatically. It seems that the
same company also makes a IDE backplane which makes some
sort of hot swapping availble. WD gives a 5 year life span  
to the drive, but by then I'm sure you could just buy the 
new 300GB drives and stick them in (what is that... 240TB,
good lord).

For comparison Sun's A1000 gives 436GB for $22,220.00 or
a nickel a MB compared to $20,000 for this system at
6/10 of a penny per MB

Am I on crack? It just seems wrong.  Do I have some order 
of magnitude wrong here? 
What do you guys think of this?
-- 
                Jody Stephens -- (303)322-1965 x2608
                      jodys at tatteredcover.com
                     Tattered Cover Book Store
                          1628 16th Street
                         Denver, Co. 80202
                       (303)322-1965 Offices
(303)436-1070 LoDo Store         (303)629-1704 Office and LoDo Fax
(303)322-7727 Cherry Creek Store (303)399-2279 Cherry Creek Fax