On Wed, 6 Jan 2010, Joseph L. Casale wrote:
While I have built many, I can tell you that buying a turnkey solution is *always* worth it if its mission critical. When you piece something together, you are always in for potential surprises and other caveats.
Like the rest have stated, I can only say that you haven't mentioned how busy it will be. That might dictate which type of sata drives or sas for example.
Whatever you do, get a good controller with nvram. I have a lot of LSI and while they are rock solid, the gui is a piece of sh!t and full of bugs. I always use the cli unless not possible.
Frankly, I always hated Adaptec, but I have seen mention of them making some sas controllers that performed better that lsi? Take that w/ a grain of salt, but next controller I buy, I am shopping around...
We use Dell 2950s with an MD3000 or MD1000 depending on OS. For our Solaris NAS node we use the MD1000 for CentOS we use the MD3000 because of the hardware RAID controller. Gives us 15TB of RAW disk space with 1TB drives plus room for 4-5 additional drives (based on configuration) in the chassis.