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