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" wrote in message
om...
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