2 TB storage solution

Hi everyone,

I'm wondering what are the low cost solution for 2 Terabytes storage.

It's SAN, NAS or something else.

Thanks

Sam

Sam wrote:

Hi everyone,

I'm wondering what are the low cost solution for 2 Terabytes storage.

It's SAN, NAS or something else.

Thanks

Sam


As with many such questions, "It depends ..."

Performance, support, backup, security, and price are all things to
consider. If you're starting up the next Google your needs will be
different from if you're storing your CD collection.

--
The e-mail address in our reply-to line is reversed in an attempt to
minimize spam. Our true address is of the form .

Sam wrote:

Hi everyone,

I'm wondering what are the low cost solution for 2 Terabytes storage.

It's SAN, NAS or something else.

Thanks

Sam



Maxtor has a 300GB PATA HD for 300$US. 2 per IDE cable, using the
dual on-board IDE of typical MBs, plus a PCI-IDE controller, gets
a real cheap hardware solution: just glue it onto your 10bT or
100 bTX network. For cheap software, make each HD a share, under
XP or even W9x. Done.

And, since you care about cost, don't create backup procedures or
buy any backup software, and don't bother with UPS or even a line
conditioner; also, you can save a lot on HVAC and temperature
monitoring, by letting your PCs and HDs run at the redline.

Oh, did you also want reliability and data integrity? That costs
a few $s more.
--
Cheers, Bob

"Sam" wrote in news:c7gc8u$1eeb$1
@cti15.citenet.net:

Hi everyone,

I'm wondering what are the low cost solution for 2 Terabytes storage.

It's SAN, NAS or something else.

Thanks

Sam


This is just an example. Take it all with a grain of salt. Your needs are
most likely different from mine.

You might want to review some of the sites that compare SAN vs NAS, just to
make sure you don't have any specific requirements that might be better
served by one vs the other. Things like redundancy, fault tolerance, down
time, performance, etc. Those factors might affect which option you go
with and how much it will cost. But based on lowest price alone, I think
the lowest priced option would be a build-it-yourself NAS.

This is what I would want if building my own low cost 2TB storage for home
use. I only have about 400GB right now, soon to be 700GB by next week.
It's mostly for video, music, and backup, so speed is not a big factor. My
backup media includes DLT, DVD-R, and CDR.

I also built something similar for work. But it was for a very low-risk
storage area that was not considered production, just test. Anything in our
"production" environment is built with SCSI hot swap arrays and hardware
RAID, 1 or 5, minimum. Production servers that need more storage or fault
tolerance get fiber channel arrays. If they need more fault tolerance,
storage, or speed then they go on EMC or Hitachi SANs. There's quite a
range of options out there, and prices to go along with them.

- Pick your OS and connectivity method that you want to use. Linux,
Windows, etc. Suggest you decide this soon because you'll want to make sure
the hardware you buy is compatible with the OS you plan to use. A lot of
people use Linux / Samba because it's free and performs well with limited
hardware.

- Buy a server case. You'll need bays for all your drives, fans for
cooling, and a good power supply to keep it going.

- You should decide if you will be adding any optical or tape backup units
to this server, and if they will be internal or external.

- Add motherboard, cpu(s), ram. How much cpu and ram you need depends on
what OS you're running, and what else you plan to run on this server. I.E.
virus scanning, backup software, etc.

- Many motherboards have integrated video/sound/network/usb/firewire so you
don't have to get those separate if you don't want to.

- Install an ATA RAID controller. I like the 3Ware ATA controllers for 8
or 12 drives, but Adaptec sells some nice ones too. Populate it with some
high density ATA drives, like the Maxline II 300GB drives. You'll need to
decide how much fault tolerance you want, if any. The 3Ware card can do
RAID 5 with a hotspare for example. 9x300GB drives in this config would
get you to 2TB of storage. 7x300=2100 plus one more with Raid 5 plus one
more for hotspare. Software RAID is possible but I wouldn't recommend it.
I'd rather use a hardware RAID controller.

If you don't want to build it yourself, you could either pay someone to
build it, or you could to do some shopping around for a turn-key solution.
A while back I did some looking through magazines and web sites, and from
my limited shopping, it seems if you're looking for the absolute lowest
priced options, you'll probably see more low-end NAS options to choose from
than SAN solutions. I went the DIY route.

For the low-end NAS solutions, you can find cheap boxes that run Windows or
Linux or similar OS, and a number of ATA drives. You connect over Windows
SMB share over your existing network. Often management is done through a
web page. I don't know the names of ones that do 2TB off the top of my
head but I'm sure you can find some today since the 300GB drives are more
common now. Previously a lot of these arrays came with 120 or 160GB
drives.

For SAN solutions, you will also find a wide range of prices. You start
with a disk storage unit and something to manage the disk array. To that,
you typically add servers and the fabric that connects the servers to the
storage. For example, in some low-cost options, you will find ATA drive
enclosures that allow you to build an ATA array and connect it to your
server(s) using SCSI cards. At the high end, you will find options that
are faster, more fault tolerant and more expensive. For example, arrays
built with SCSI or SCSI Fiber drives, several GB of cache, using multi-
gigabit redundant switched fabric connecting the storage to clustered
servers. Some configurations even use redundant switches and back up the
entire works with batteries, not just the cache. Depends what your needs
are.

Best of luck on building your server.

"Sam" wrote in message
...
Hi everyone,

I'm wondering what are the low cost solution for 2 Terabytes storage.

It's SAN, NAS or something else.

8x250GB. These are widely available on EBay, for reasonable prices.

In article Xns94E2AAB3B7DCgrinchhatespamyucksh@
24.71.223.159, y says...
- Install an ATA RAID controller. I like the 3Ware ATA controllers for 8
or 12 drives, but Adaptec sells some nice ones too. Populate it with some
high density ATA drives, like the Maxline II 300GB drives. You'll need to
decide how much fault tolerance you want, if any. The 3Ware card can do
RAID 5 with a hotspare for example. 9x300GB drives in this config would
get you to 2TB of storage. 7x300=2100 plus one more with Raid 5 plus one
more for hotspare. Software RAID is possible but I wouldn't recommend it.
I'd rather use a hardware RAID controller.


Hitachi 400GB drives are here (not sure if they're in
the market yet). Eight of those in a RAID5 config with
a hot-spare will probably net out around 2100GB (real,
honest computer gigabytes).

The math...

400*1000*1000*1000 = 400000000000
400000000000/1024/1024/1024 = 372GB
372 * 6 = 2232GB or 2.18TB.

3ware arrays do have a 2TB limit per set.

"Mr. Grinch" wrote in message

This is what I would want if building my own low cost 2TB storage for home
use. I only have about 400GB right now, soon to be 700GB by next week.
It's mostly for video, music, and backup, so speed is not a big factor.
My
backup media includes DLT, DVD-R, and CDR.

The most price-performance effective backup media in a small business or
home is one of those 300GB ATA HDs in a removeable tray or USB2.