[CentOS] I need storage server advice

[Les Mikesell]

John R Pierce wrote:
>  
> infrastructure to support lots of SATA drives isn't real cheap 
> regardless.   you really don't want to just bolt a bunch of drives up 
> inside a jumbo desktop tower and call it a server.     5 years at that 
> run rate is going to be something like 12TB total storage, which using 
> commodity 500GB SATA drives in raid10 will take around 48 drives.   
> Thats a lot of SATA channels...

1TB drives are available now.  5 years from now, who knows?

> since your data is archival in nature, it really shouldn't be that hard 
> to manage it as multiple 2 TB chunks on seperate file systems.   when 
> you fill 2TB, take 8 x 500GB more SATA drives, raid10 them, and mount 
> them as another file system, /u01, /u02, ....    keep an index file 
> somewhere which logs which backups are where.

If it's really rarely used and you have a sensible scheme to find it you 
could just have a drawer full of inexpensive external 1TB drives that 
you can plug in on demand, using USB, firewire, or sata connections.

-- 
    Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com