[TriLUG] Best RAID solution?

[Don Jerman]

Your best bet is probably to build, if price is your controlling
factor.  Hard drives will more than half of your build cost.  You
haven't said what you want besides cheap, so I'll make assumptions and
play along (since I'm sufficiently bored and curious).

Assumption - you want a big file server and have nothing you want to
recycle into building it.

The base box should run you under $300 using a M2NPV-VM micro-atx
motherboard with built-in video and a cheap socket AM2 processor,
decently cheap 500W power supply, 1G memory, dvd-rw (PATA).  Gets you
the 4 SATA2 ports and sundry peripherals built-in and you come up to
around $285 at newegg, using the open-box board.  You will want to
spend a tiny bit more if you need to actually do anything with the
processor.  Buy a lot more RAM and a dual-core processor if you're
doing a database server, for instance, but if it's just there to run
Linux and glue the drives to the network port, cheap is good enough.

I recommend this board only because I recently built a system with it
so I know the drivers work :).  Newegg is just an indicative benchmark
- you may be able to find better pricing for some parts.  You may find
intel boards and processors are cheaper but watch compatibility.

So now add storage -  2 more SATA2 cables, 4 hard disks and an extra
gig-E pci-x card and you'll run in the $700-$1500 range or higher,
depending on what you want to spend on storage.  500G drives run from
$99 each, 1T drives will cost more, 10k rpm drives are more yet.  You
can easily spend over $1200 on drives for a 3TB Raid5.

If it's just a storage server a single gig-e card might be all you
need - 4 7200 rpm drives can only read about 240MB/Sec sustained
(allowing a generous 60MB/Sec each), which will push gig-e to
capacity, but just barely.



On 11/1/07, Charles Fischer <fischer at 4pi.com> wrote:
> I am looking for a very low cost RAID Linux box.  I want 4 SATA drives,
> one DVD drive and 2 GigE ports.  Any suggestions?
>
> Thanks
> Charles Fischer
>
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