Your requirements sound strangely similar to my project... I have a need for
10TB usable space with RAID10. From my research and current hardware in the
office, I am going with rackable.com's storage servers. For $90k, they will
give me 5 storage severs and a gigabit ethernet switch in their cabinet.
Each server has 16x250gb SATA for storage, 2x300gb for OS/tmp and 2x2.2ghz
Opteron with 4gb or memory. They will install linux on the servers for you.

Since I want Raid10, it is much costlier than your raid5. We have used
rackable.com's stuff for 3 years now. No complaints.

"Alex Lazarevich" <alazarev@itg.uiuc.edu> wrote in message
news:d40e4ab6.0403031137.5aab658e@posting.google.com...
> We need to acquire about 8TB of disk storage space for 20K or less. We
> need to attach this disk storage to our Adaptec 29160LP, which is in a
> Dell PowerEdge 4600, running RH linux 9.0. The disk storage will be
> fileserved over a gigabit network, so we'd like to have decent
> performance as well. The data we want to move fast along the gig
> network are image files averaging larger than 1-2MB per file. As far
> as we can tell, out best option is SCSI-SATA RAID system in a RAID 5
> configuration.
>
> First off, does anyone think we have a better option than SCSI-SATA
> RAID 5 for about 8TB for 20K?
>
> I've got several quotes from SCSI-SATA RAID vendors (RaidKing, AMS,
> Excel Meridian) all of who sell 4TB SCSI-SATA RAID systems for about
> 10K a piece, some more some less, but all are right around 20K for 8TB
> of storage. So the things left to decide on are RELIABILITY and
> PERFORMANCE.
>
> Can anyone recommend any of those vendors I mentioned? Or is there
> another vendor who you have great experience with? Currently we have
> about 1.5TB of storage on SCSI disks attached to a Dell RAID
> controller card so we are used to the reliability of SCSI disks. But I
> don't mind replacing a drive now and then - we'll have cold spares
> ready to go in, so I'm not too concerned about drive failure. Even if
> two drives failed at the same time, we also have tape backups, so
> everything is restorable. I'm more concerned about the reliability of
> the unit, the controller card, the ease of configuration, the
> sustainability of the RAID array, etc.
>
> Now what about performance - does anyone use SCSI-SATA RAID 5 in a gig
> network environment? What kind of performance do you see? Is the
> bottleneck the network or is it the disk system? Any information you
> can give me might help me out. Anyone know of a website that tests and
> specs out SCSI-SATA RAID systems? I'd love to hear about it if you
> know of it.
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Alex

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