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Since the price difference is only 30%

Ahhhh to be able to look at the toys and not pay attention to the price tag again *sigh*

Try purchasing a couple 6 terabyte file servers and then ask yourself how much a non-"kinda hackish" solution is worth. $10,000? $20,000?

I can vouch for the stability and speed of one pre-built IDE-RAID Product. RaidZone OpenNAS They use a special raid controller that allows increased IDE Raid speed, and IDE Hot-Swap capability. This one had a total of 1.2TB (plus hot spare). The project involved a unique (to this project) Application that required a proprietary Database System that could only run on an MS Win2k Server, therefore we didnt fully utilize the sytems capabilities. It served as a file server for images (ranging in size from 60kB to well over 100MB per image) (and as I recall the Image Store is now around 500GB), MS SQL Server, confidential proprietary DB system (indexed images, among other things), and several small services (and the chunky MS GUI). It even has a 900GB native backup system attached. The load ranges. Since we put it into action early 2002 it hasn't missed a beat. I would recommend it highly for most applications, though there does come a time when higher speed drives are needed.

http://www.raidzone.com/

For the reading impaired, these guys sell IDE-based NAS units. They have some custom hardware which allows regular IDE disks to be hot-swapped and shiz, as well as getting around the normal IDE bus limitation.

I don't work for 'em or sell 'em. I bought one for work a year ago. It uses 10 100GB drives in RAID5 + 1 hotspare to give me 738GB usable.

I paid about $12k for 738GB of hot-swappable raid5 NAS with snapshots. Not bad.

It's supposed to be fast, cheap, and reliable....

I can't believe you guys modded a troll up to 3...

I guess this sucks?

Or This?

This?

This?

These?

This stuff?

IDE is here to stay in the high end market, and it's going to kick SCSI's ass. Why pay 3X more per drive for the same HDA with a different interface board?

This is from the server in the first link above. Note that most of the write bottleneck is caused not by the drives but by the hardware RAID5 controller.

Machine Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP /sec %CP
bedford 1G 24436 11 22834 13 83890 43 361.2 2

You can easily add 400gb of disk space to a regular pc for about $1200. In our case we do it all in less than 100.

This price sounds rather high. You can add a complete server with RAID storage for less than that. I had a quick check at RaidZone, and a cube with 10x60GB drives gives you 470GB available to users with a hot spare, and it runs at a wee bit over 10K. As a backup system, it's overkill - you probably don't need Raid but I wanted a fast price snapshot.
http://www.raidzone.com/Products___Solutions/Appli ances_Overview/AppPrices/appprices.html

Personally, we do use online storage for some of our archives, because our users need very fast restores. We create zip files on disk ,give them an automated method to pull from them, but also back up the archives to tape for long-term offsite storage.

We put 8 80 GB maxtors and an Escalade 6800 in an old Gateway P166 tower with 32 MB, an extra power supply, 3 extra fans, and 2 NICs, running Linux 2.4 kernel running recent NFS code.

The only trouble was when I tried to format the drives with Partition Magic; it couldn't handle the size and corrupted my partition table! It's now running great. A drive died once, but came back online; the rebuild ran flawlessly. PS whoever posted about using PowerFile should have checked the prices first.

I have a hard copy of http://www.raidzone.com taped to the side of the box.

It's used to send and retrieve large files over the 'net; I haven't even bothered to benchmark it, as the 'net will be the bottleneck.

For case 1, let's assume complete a complete linux front to back solution, with as much free (or mostly free) software as possible:

Needed Software Components:

1. Favourite Distro of Linux
2. MySQL or Postgres Database (personal pref is for MySQL... not going to get into the pros and cons here...)
3. Dynaminc Web-Scripting Language (PHP, Perl, whatever... personal pref for this kind of thing is PHP... again, I'm not debating at the moment...)
4. Linux Vitrual Server Project - very solid load-balancing from my experience. Don't know how it compares with the appliances on the market... but it's still solid.
5. HA/Redundancy software (Linux HA project isn't quite there... but they're getting close... there are some commercial packages available - one that's free for non-profit use - http://www.high-availability.com

Hardware:

NB: For maximum up-time I recommend systems with redundant hardware (backup power supplies, dual NICs, and RAID arrays)

1. Firewall/Load-balancer - preferably using HA/Redundancy software on two machines... Mirrored (RAID 1, right?) boot/system hot-plug drives are a good idea.
2. Web-farm - up to X systems (where X+1 breaks your budget... ;) ) load balanced with Virtual Server Project. For a reasonably heavy duty method of doing this relatively cheaply, see Cubix and their "density" series... up to 8 servers in a single box... with hot plug everything. RAID isn't as necessary here... as the systems themselves are effective your RAID...
3. Database system - again preferably an HA/Redundancy cluster for maximum availability. I recommend a mirrored boot/system disk again, with a RAID 5 array (or RAID 5+5 - mirrored RAID arrays) for speed and maximum availability... highest RPM drives you can afford can help here a lot for speed, too.
4. 100 BaseT Switch for maximum through-put. Personal preference is for Cisco but your budget dollars may vary.
5. I've mentioned RAID a couple of times... you can get SCSI and IDE raid these days (SCSI being more common)... the cheapest/fastest one I've see is from Raidzone - very nice, check them out (up to 15 - 40 GIG hot-plug IDE drives in one array, with a very high through-put). You can also do software RAID, taking a performance hit, but saving coin...

Case 2 assumes that you don't mind using some commercial stuff... and have a bigger budget:

1. Replace Virtual Server with an appliance. (Alteon, F5 and Cisco all make good products... presently my preference is with F5's BigIP.
2. Replace in born Linux firewall with Checkpoint's firewall-1 running under linux - or an appliance firewall, a Cisco PIX is very nice, and has very high though-put. The Nokia appliance running Checkpoint and a BSD bastardisation is quite nice.

For controllers, western digital has URL's at this main link. Click on the "Solutions" link to go to suggested solutions for common problems with UDMA/66. For prebuilt IDE RAID system, try here.