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Turnkey Linux RAID Solutions?
Total-Gig-Age asks: "I want to buy an expandable RAID system for home storage of large media files (music, film, and photo). I'm absolutely unwilling to rely on optical discs (bit rot, not always online) and un-RAID-ed hard drives (unsafe: if it fails, you're screwed). The thing is, I don't have time to shop for and configure a RAID system myself, and I want a turnkey solution that will just work out of the box. I'm aware of Apple's XServe, but $6000 for 1 TB is just too expensive. What are my best options if I want to buy an open source system that I can maintain and upgrade if need be? Any recommendations on a full set of components, so that I don't have to spend a week shopping? Trustworthy online companies? Can I trust a local store to do it for me? Is it better to keep the server as a separate machine? Finally, how much should I expect to spend if I want something that doesn't suck (for 1TB say)? I can find plenty of info on how to set up RAID on the Internet, but I just want to be told what to buy so I can get on with other things, even though I could probably handle setting the whole thing up myself if I had to."
I got a couple of Promise UltraTrak SX4000 4 Channel External RAID Enclosures at $WORK to evaluate and while they aren't fast enough for me to move a production Oracle server to, they are plenty fast for a home media server and are quite affordable.
Each enclosure presents itself as a SCSI drive. You can chain enclosures together and use LVM to make them available to one (or more) filesystem(s). Hardware RAID takes place within each enclosure, but not across them.
Mine were set up with four 300GB drives which, after RAID5 overhead, gave me 900GB of usable space per enclosure (I had two enclosures). You could easily use 400GB drives and have 1.2TB per enclosure if you wanted. I would think that total cost for the enclosure with 400GB disks would be around $2500 US.
LaCie recently announced their F800 desktop RAID solution. 1.0, 1.6 and 2.0 terabyte models are available. The array connects to a host computer via IEEE1394 (Firewire) or USB 2.0. The array can be configured as RAID levels 0, 0+1, 5, and RAID 5+hot spare. PriceGrabber lists the 1.0TB version for just under US$1500 and the 1.6TB for US$2700.