I have 16,511 unique mp3s primarily organized into full-albums, loose, and live/single_track. I keep them all on an externally attached scsi raid array (raid 5) and manage/stream them locally for my wife and I with Jinzora. Check out http://www.jinzora.org.
If you are not in the market for scsi raid, then I would have to look first to a box built with a 3ware SATA 8000 series "Escalade" raid card and 4 or 5 400gb disks. Raid 5 with a hot spare in a 5 drive config would give you 1.2tb usable space plus the hot spare. These cards are "true" raid as opposed to the "fakeraid" provided by most other ATA/SATA raid cards out there. Check out http://www.3ware.com/products/serial_ata8000.asp for this model. I have no experience with the 9000 cards though I hear they are good as well, though more pricey. This is a good reference for ATA/SATA raid http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html. The only thing I have seen weird with SATA raid is in external arrays. IDE can take a lot longer in terms of error correction than SCSI and the HBA will not wait long before marking the drive bad (even though it is not). I have to manage 8 16-drive arrays like this and haven't lost any data, though be sure that if your HBA marks 2 drives bad simultaneously you could be in for a 16+ hour rebuild on the array. Needless to say, for critical data, these arrays are not the final destination for that data. Hope that helps you some. -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/ TriLUG PGP Keyring : http://trilug.org/~chrish/trilug.asc
