Hi folks, I want to pick your brains. I'm building a new disk server for a small company, about 20 people. We need about 2 TB now and maybe another 2 TB in a year or so. Price is a factor, but reliability is more important. I'm planning to build a server-class PC from parts, and use the standard RAID + LVM setup for growing the disk space in the future. Does this seem reasonable? I'm planning to use SATA disks, because they seem to offer a good balance between performance, price, and reliability. I wish Linux SATA supported SMART and hotplug! I've had several drive failures with Maxtor 300 GB PATA and 320 GB SATA disks this year, what's a more reliable drive people use? I'd prefer to buy fewer, higher-capacity drives (300+ GB). Any experience with the new 500's? I'm planning to put all the disks in a big tower case like the CoolerMaster Stacker <http://www.coolermaster-usa.com/CoolerMaster/ProductList.aspx?catID=614>, probably using the CoolerMaster 3-to-4 disk adapter. I'd like dual, redundant power supplies. Any particular cases & power supplies work well for y'all? Some sort of name-brand motherboard & CPU, about 2 GB RAM, and I'm done! SATA disk controllers usually come in 2x, 4x, and 8x versions, so there's a slight advantage to building arrays that use those numbers of disks. I've mostly been using 4-disk RAID-5 arrays in the past, but I'd like more redundancy. 4-disk RAID-6 seems is an option, as is 8-disk RAID-6 with a hot spare. What else should I be considering? Am I on the right track here? I'm worried that I'm just scaling up my home setup, maybe I'm missing an opportunity to do something smarter here. -- Sebastian Kuzminsky - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
