massive storage options

[jdwright]

Any recommendations for a 100+ gig, standalone, network file server for a small printing operation? SCSI? Raid? Cases? or even a complete setup? Speed is of the essence!

thanks in advance for the help!

 

[Vegito]

I have a Maxtor Maxattach 240. 240 Gigs.. or 120 RAID mirrored. 10/100 Network Attached.. 3000+ if you can stomach it.

 

[dszd0g]

Rate each of these by priority:

Price
Speed
Reliability

Pick 2

Seriously though, I generally go with SCSI for servers because SCSI hard drives are typically more reliable than IDE. However, you can almost do IDE RAID 0+1 for the same price as SCSI RAID 5 and the performance of the IDE RAID 0+1 would most likely be better assuming you use 7200RPM IDE drives and 10K SCSI drives (If you used 15K SCSI or 5200 RPM IDE, the SCSI would be faster.) SCSI RAID 0 is going to be faster than just IDE RAID 0 assuming you use faster SCSI drives, but the IDE RAID 0 is going to be a lot cheaper.

If this isn't mission critical data or your backups are frequent enough that it is an acceptable risk use RAID 0 (striping).

The biggest advantages of SCSI over IDE are that one can obtain higher RPM SCSI drives and SCSI drives are typically more reliable. IDE is a lot cheaper and the fastest SCSI drives do not hold as much data as the largest IDE drives.

If you really care about uptime (i.e. 99.5% uptime) you probably want to run either SCSI RAID 5 (with a spare disk), IDE RAID 0+1, or SCSI RAID 0+1. You would also want an enclosure with redundant SCSI busses, power supplies, and controllers. Then you would want to put it all on a UPS.

In other words, give us more info on exactly what you want.

 

[The Stigenator]

massive storage eh?

Ok check these out in order of my preference:

Medea SCSI - required machine - Medea Corp
Quantum - Network Attached 1U - snap server
Maxtor Maxattache

The medea might say "Video Raid" but it can be used for any storage option.

 

[Vegito]

When I bought my maxattach, they didn't have the quantum 240.. and when I ask the sales, those idiot didn't know jack.. 1 month later.. released..

Quantum Snap has RAID 5!!!!! maxtor, doesn't

 

[obeseotron]

You could buy 4 Maxtor DM80's and RAID 0+1 them in a Linux PC for 160GB redundant storage for less than $1800 I would imagine.

 

[Vegito]

Yeah, thats actually the better way except those maxtor/quantum are 1U, smaller and does not require a vid card, just http into the device. Lose a IP , gain space.

 

[Edski]

Forcesho, those MaxAttaches are nice. I have 3 of them from when I used to work for Maxtor. Within the next 6 months they will be coming out with their MaxAttach 5000, you have the 4000. The 5000 is going to be sweet, hotswapable and field upgradable. The sizes that they were talking about were up to the 2terabytes. Any NAS device is nice, you never have to bring your server down to install it and in most cases you can have it up and rinning within 5 minutes.