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Turnkey Linux RAID Solutions?

Posted by Cliff on from the low-maintenance-data-options dept.

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."

1 of 110 comments (clear)

  1. $6,000 by vasqzr · · Score: 5, Interesting


    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

    You're paying $6,000 because Apple does the work for you.

    I suppose you could get a tower PC, and fill it with hard drives and setup RAID. Cheaper? Yea. Reliable? Yea. But there's more to it than that.

    I googled for 'building 1TB server'

    http://www.martinandalex.com/blog/archives/2005/01 /building_1tb_ra.html

    Home 1TB RAID Server
    CPU Athlon 3200+ $199 Frys 11x multiplier, should over clock to 2.6GHz easily
    Memory 1GB Corsair 4400C25 $275 Very fast at DDR466
    Motherboard ASUS K8N-E Deluxe $149.99 Frys, 6 SATA RAID chips on Motherboard, 3GB memory
    Case SUPERMICRO Beige 4U Rackmount Chassis, Model "SC742T-550 Beige" $307.50 New Egg. Has 7 SATA backplane built in
    CD drive NEC 3500A $67 newegg or zipzoomfly
    system drive WD740GD $185 10000 rpm system drive
    Data drive Maxtor DiamondMax 10 250GB $149.99 ($.59/gig vs $.68/gig for 300GB) 5 of these bad boyz

    total: $1933.48 or less than $2 per gig for RAID. Half the cost of white boxes and 1/3 the cost of anything from the channel.

    Here's another article, more information

    http://www.ethics-gradient.net/myth/storage.html