1 TB and beyond

theacoustician

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Sep 30, 2004
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Ok, put your nerd hats on. Here's a question :

I need some massive data storage. 1 TB or better and it needs to have some recovery mechanism, so RAID0 is out. JBOD might be ok, since data loss would be localized, but you still would loose about 200 GB+ of data if a drive fails and backups would be a bitch, so I don't see that really being an option either. RAID1 would just cost too damn much, so it seems that RAID5 would be the way to go. Now, the question is how to get there? I haven't seen a RAID controller that will do more than 4 drives that runs off standard PCI (4+ are all PCI-X) and I can't find a motherboard that will do it either. So basically that pigeonholes me at 400GB drives. Is there any other way that I'm missing here? I'm either left using an expensive server motherboard with PCI-X, expensive controllers, and cheap discs -or- a cheap motherboard with cheaper controllers/onboard controllers and expensive discs ... correct?
 
more drives + smaller drives = lesser chance of catastrophic data loss.
 
What you said sounds about right. The only way to get that much backup storage would be an external hardware RAID. Dell has some nice new RAIDS that can hooked directly to the network.
 
I actually was leaning more towards the server board option, but I need one with a couple of regular PCI slots (3-4) as well as 1 PCI-X for ... things ... :shifty:
 
We've bought a few 20K+ Sun Backup Tape Changers over the past few months. And everyone of them has been junk. We've had to send all of them back at least once. Avoid them. They do a few hundred gig backups per tape.
 
ChikkenNoodul said:
++ or NAS like a small CX300, or the Dell-branded version
we've got two of the larger EMC units in our mainframe. IIRC, it's 1TB of storage but it's all mirrored and striped so there's really 2TB of disk. It's all connected via fiber, it's fast. :drool:
 
CletusJones said:
we've got two of the larger EMC units in our mainframe. IIRC, it's 1TB of storage but it's all mirrored and striped so there's really 2TB of disk. It's all connected via fiber, it's fast. :drool:
cnemc1.jpg



This was taken a few months ago, I have a lot more storage now
 
Drool-Boy said:
why the flying shit would you need 1ticklebit of storage at home?

Thats not a lot if you're ripping full quality DVD's, Hidef broadcasts, or hidef DVDs.
 
BigDov said:
What happened to that motherboard I showed you a couple weeks ago???? That one had what you were looking for on it I thought....... RAID5 even.
That's one option. I mention it above as the onboard thing. This thread was just a sanity check to see if it was really the best investment.
 
4 drive PCI card + 1 onboard IDE/SATA = 5 * 200GB = 1TB

Just do the RAID5 with Windows... The 6th drive would then be your boot drive.

Unless you want to get a REAL (hardware) RAID card...