Like any good question, the answer is "it depends." Some of the things you should ask yourself are:
- how much uptime/reliability do the end-users want/require? greater reliability = greater cost - how will the storage be used? transaction intensive applications or primarily static files? - who will support the disk? are you going to do it by yourself or do you want someone else to handle it for you? outsourced support = greater cost Answering these questions will help you narrow down your search. If the users don't require five nines for uptime/reliability, then you can get away with running a roboust Linux server outfitted with a SCSI based RAID array serving files via both SAMBA and NFS. If the storage is critical, then you might want to talk to someone at HONCAD or elsewhere about what you can do (HONCAD was selling NetApp boxes that were previously leased to Square...see the HONCAD website). My $0.02. Dwight... -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of TB Sent: Thursday, September 25, 2003 12:58 PM To: luau Subject: [luau] storage - need raid? I need storage for about 40 users x about 10 gigs each, so 400 gigs or more. I'm unfortunately utterly ignorant in this area. I've googled around & found some very expensive raid array solutions. My budget is around $1500. I have a mixed lab of PCs running w2k and SGs running IRIX (plus some servers running Redhat), kind of a shoe-string operation in the UH art dept. Users want to log in & access their space from any workstation. What sort of google search should I do to get up to speed in this area? Should I just buy a cheap PC & put two big hard drives in it & share with NFS & samba? NFS, samba, webdav, other? scsi or IDE? homemade raid? How to evaluate reliability? There are a lot of issues here I haven't had to deal with before. All help appreciated. TDB _______________________________________________ LUAU mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://videl.ics.hawaii.edu/mailman/listinfo/luau
