Rudi Ahlers wrote:
You're quite right with what you say. I have a 2U chassis already, with a Gigabyte motherboard + 2GB RAM + Core 2 Duo E7650. I also have a few 160GB SATA HDD's laying around, but they're too small. So, I'll be option to put 6 (if I can get the HDD cages fitted into the chassis) 1TB HDD's into it instead, which with RAID 10 will give me 3TB space.
Thus, I don't want to spend more money to buy new equipment if I have this already.
Using CentOS is preferred since I know it the best. I haven't used FreeBSD since v4.7 ( I think I had a look @ 4.9 & 5.4 as well), and I don't know Solaris. I think my action plan now will be to figure out how to install CentOS on a USB memory stick and make it boot on any machine (making it easy to replace if need be), and then to play around with the RAID a bit and see how well it works.
Or you could just install on small /boot (separate) and / (can be in LVM) partitions on the HD's this time around and work out the details of the USB boot when Centos 6 is available. Maybe there will be cheap 32Gb devices by then.