[rescue] Any Minneapolis area listers ?

[Lionel Peterson]

>From: Magnus <magnus at yonderway.com>
>Date: 2007/01/09 Tue PM 10:21:15 CST
>To: The Rescue List <rescue at sunhelp.org>
>Subject: Re: [rescue] Any Minneapolis area listers ?

>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.

The system I was envisioning exploited the on-board SATA RAID and used a 
known-good 4 bay hot-swap chassis.

If you want _absolute_ low-price, stuffing up to 6 or more drives in fixed 
bays, that would be one way to go (I have no problem with it, other than the 
need to power down when a drive fails).

But going above 4 drives makes the on-board RAID inadequate, and you'll need 
to add a RAID controller (at considerable expense for a good controller).

>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.

That is a reasonable suggestion, but check your RAID controller documentation 
- larger drives may suffice for a replacement, if you are willing to lose 
some capacity...

>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.

Both are reasonable approaches, I just wanted to shed a bit of light on th 
elogic of my suggestion...

Lionel