On 5/11/07, Lennart Sorensen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
2Tb would really need raid5, so you would be looking at 5*500GB or maybe 4X750GB or 3*1TB, which would make it rather tricky to get a server with that for under $3000. $4000 looks much more likely. Rack mount servers do cost more, and for hosted systems rack mount is really the only option.
With disks of this size, I have to chime in against RAID5 in any way. It is far too likely to lose a sector on two disks, and even if you had a hot spare to immediately start a rebuild onto, I've seen too many RAID5 arrays (especially SATA/PATA) go south. The cost of mirroring the storage initially (either RAID1 or via rsync to a paired machine) will be dwarfed by what you spend on hosting/bandwidth/power and god forbid losing a R5 array. Also, when drives do go bad, not having to sift through parity to find what's recoverable is priceless. I might be Jaded, every day when I show up to work at least 1 drive has gone bad, sometimes 3. On this scale what in a previous life seemed statistically insignificant suddenly has real meaning. 2 boxes with 4x500GB disks should cost close to $3K. Mirror the data, the services, etc... and sleep easy at night. -Joerg
