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Plenty of enterprise class hardware use SATA drives for large storage.
The largest SAS drive I've ever seen is 400GB 10000RPM. If there is larger then I simply have it seen it, but I imagine it's pricing is flat out absurd.
This is at a time when 1TB enterprise-class SATA drives from multiple manufacturers are easily purchaseable for $300. Obviously assemblers of the systems markup their drive cost considerably, but I have no qualms about using a SAN or a NAS with SATA drives when absurd amounts of storage are needed.
With all that said, if this server is doing database duty and file sharing for that amount of users, then I would go with SATA and RAID 10 without a second thought. RAID 10 is my personal preference for database server or virtualization.
It is true that RAID 10 cannot sustain two random disk failures, only the first disk failure may be random. However RAID is not a backup tool, it is an uptime tool. If this is of that much concern to you, then use a hot spare imho.
I suppose some people will always prefer the added security of RAID 6, but to me the speed of RAID 10 is worth it.
Edit: Oh yeah, you were asking about what database software to use as well.
Don't throw SQL Express Edition out the window if it's a small database (less than 1GB.) Otherwise, you'll want to go for something more serious that others have listed like Oracle.
The largest SAS drive I've ever seen is 400GB 10000RPM. If there is larger then I simply have it seen it, but I imagine it's pricing is flat out absurd.
This is at a time when 1TB enterprise-class SATA drives from multiple manufacturers are easily purchaseable for $300. Obviously assemblers of the systems markup their drive cost considerably, but I have no qualms about using a SAN or a NAS with SATA drives when absurd amounts of storage are needed.
With all that said, if this server is doing database duty and file sharing for that amount of users, then I would go with SATA and RAID 10 without a second thought. RAID 10 is my personal preference for database server or virtualization.
It is true that RAID 10 cannot sustain two random disk failures, only the first disk failure may be random. However RAID is not a backup tool, it is an uptime tool. If this is of that much concern to you, then use a hot spare imho.
I suppose some people will always prefer the added security of RAID 6, but to me the speed of RAID 10 is worth it.
Edit: Oh yeah, you were asking about what database software to use as well.
Don't throw SQL Express Edition out the window if it's a small database (less than 1GB.) Otherwise, you'll want to go for something more serious that others have listed like Oracle.
