More economical way to get to 4TB?

[Laforge]

Dell has their poweredge storage servers (14 bay) for U320 scsi. They are nice rigs, rackmountable, etc..

As I said, they are 14bay, and can even have redundant 600Watt PSU's.

Using 14x300GB 10K rpm U320 scsi drives, I can get to 4.2 TB (before formatting, raiding, etc..)


Cost? $14,000.

Anyone know of a way to bring this down slightly, whilst still having it be an autonomous solution.. I.e. something I can attach to my network relatively easily.

I mean, coastline micro does a 6.4 tb for that price :-)

[DougLite]

Well, let's see here. The absolute cheapest 300GB SCSI drive on ZZF is $682. (Hitachi UltraStar 10K300). Fujitsu units are well over $700, Maxtor over $800, and Seagate nearly $1000 :eek: We'll split the difference, go with Fujitsu, and shell out over $10,000 :eek: on 4.2TB worth of SCSI drives.

WD4000YRs are $220 from the same dealer, so we shell out $2640 for 4.8TB worth of WD4000YR drives in preformatted/pre RAID capacity. That would allow you to achieve 4 decimal TB of capacity in either RAID-6 or RAID-50. With $7,000 to spare by switching to ATA drives, one would think you could get a pretty slick NAS gizmo for that. Heck, those $7,000+ will buy you a nice dual Opteron server, Areca RAID card. That would fulfill your storage requirements and give you a cool toy to play with :D

[Laforge]

Ok, so here is what I came up with. Originally, I had been looking at 18-20 disks @ 250gb each..


Newegg.com - Computers, Computer Parts and Electronics
Shopping Cart

CD/DVD Burners (RW Drives)
HP Black IDE DVD Burner Model DVD740RI - Retail
Item #: N82E16827140014

$87.99

Chose this because it's 16X DVD+/-R, 6X DVD+/-RW, 8X-DL, and Lightscribe, and Black :

ATX Computer Cases
Lian Li PC-V2000B Black Aluminum ATX Full Tower Computer Case - Retail
Item #: N82E16811112074
$250.00

12 Bays at the bottom for SATA's, 7 5.25" bays. Was looking at a rackmount design, but @ 12 bays, I'm spending $700 or so. Since i'm not looking for hot-swap, I'm good.

Internal Hard Drives
2
Maxtor DiamondMax 10 6B200R0 200GB 7200 RPM IDE Ultra ATA133 Hard Drive
Item #: N82E16822140152
$83.01 = $166.02

I chose these drives as the OS drive because of the fact that they are ata133, 7200rpm, 5 year, and 16mb. No special drivers should be needed to install the O/S, no matter what o/s it is. Maximum compatibility. Going to be put into raid1, as I don't think the O/S needs incredible I/O rates on the boot drive. Would have gone smaller, but couldn't find anything cheaper, that was also 16mb and faster than 7200rpm. These should be quite peppy for operating systems boot-up and day-to-day operations.


12 Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 ST3400832AS 400GB 7200 RPM Serial ATA150 Hard Drive with NCQ

Item #: N82E16822148063

$216.50 = $2,598.00


5 Year warranties, 8mb, 7200rpm. Run @ raid6 should have quite decent i/o rates.

AMD-compatible Motherboards
Foxconn NF4SK8AA-8EKRS Socket 939 NVIDIA nForce4 SLI ATX AMD Motherboard -

Item #: N82E16813186062
$25.00 Mail-in Rebate
$125.50 $125.50

Has dual gig-e lans, dual pci-e slots (for the areca cards), can run dual core opteron 939s if I so choose, and 4gb ram. Also has 4way sata-2 raid [0, 1, 0+1] and 4 way pata raid [0, 1, 0+1] If I decide, at a later time, to add a second areca, I can, since the second pci-e x16 slot would be empty.

Video Cards
SAPPHIRE 100945L-BK Radeon 7000 64MB DDR PCI Video Card
Item #: N82E16814102447
$35.00 $35.00

Chosen because of it's triple-outputs. Svideo, DVI, VGA. If I decide I want to hook it up to a video recorder, or to an old vga monitor, as well as kvm'ing it over my LCD, I can. Most open choice for the $.

Power Supplies

1 Athena Power AP-RRP4ATX65 mini redundant 658W 658W + 658W Dual AC Hot-Swappable mini redundant - OEM
Item #: N82E16817104160

$395.99 $395.99

Fits in standard psu space (e-atx... but standard otherwise)
dual 658s (even if they are boasting, and they are dual 500s..) is PLENTY of power.

Memory - System
CORSAIR ValueSelect 2GB (2 x 1GB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200)
Item #: N82E16820145579

$181.00 $181.00

mobo and cpu don't need ECC, [or even take it, I think] and I don't need "uber tight timings", so 2 great brand "Value" modules is good. there are two more slots free on the mobo, so I can go to 4gb down the road.

Processors

AMD Opteron 148 Venus 1GHz FSB Socket 939 Processor Model OSA148BNBOX - Retail

Item #: N82E16819103596
$249.00 $249.00

Should I really need more processor than this to run this file server? Dual core isn't that much more if I Do..

HDD Controllers / RAID Cards

Areca ARC-1230 PCI Express SATA II Controller Card - Retail
Item #: N82E16816131006
$799.00 $799.00

I know it's sata-2, but, the other drives being sata-1 won't be a conflict, and, if down the road, I decide to pop in 12 x 800gb sata 2s.. I won' t need a new card.




Grand total


Total: $4,985.12


$1250 a terabyte, raided. includes processors, casing, power, etc..


Any suggestions to tweak this down would be appreciated.

Not looking to go dual cpu (but single cpu, dual core is ok) or PCI-X..


I also chose the more expensive 400s instead of more 250s because I Figure it's easier for a system to keep track of that 12 drives (and power them) than 20. Lastly, because with 20 drives, the likelihood of one failing is higher than with 12.

[DougLite]

If you are going to buy that many hard drives, you should do so from ZipZoomFly. They pack the drives better than Newegg does. No sense at all in chancing that many drives to improper shipping.

Also for high I/O server applications, Tyan motherboard. Those suckers are bulletproof. I have a dual Slot 1 Tyan mobo that is 8 years old and still ticking like its brand new.