[lug] Cheap centralized storage

[Sexton, George]

You could look at something like the Adaptec 2400 raid controller. It has 4
IDE controller ports for a total of 8 drives. Combine that with some 320GB
drives and it would supply quite a lot of juice.

You might also want to take a look at the 3Ware controllers. I am going to
buy a low-end one and test it out. The higher end ones look quite nice. The
driver is supported in kernel 2.4.15 and higher.

http://www.3ware.com/

Now, the question becomes how do you back this up?

George Sexton
MH Software, Inc.
Home of Connect Daily Web Calendar Software
http://www.mhsoftware.com/connectdaily.htm
Voice: 303 438 9585


-----Original Message-----
From: lug-admin at lug.boulder.co.us [mailto:lug-admin at lug.boulder.co.us]On
Behalf Of Orion Poplawski
Sent: 30 October, 2002 11:26 AM
To: lug at lug.boulder.co.us
Subject: [lug] Cheap centralized storage


I'm looking for suggestions for inexpensive centralized disk storage
solutions.  I'm working for a scientific research company that uses a fair
amount of disk space, though not huge by some measures.  About 3.5 TB is in
place right now, distributed among many machines and NFS automounted on
demand.  This situation is tolerable, and it allows one to distribute cheap
IDE disks in various machines.

If possible though, I'd like to consider moving to a more centralized
solution which might provide easier management and tape backup.  However, it
seems that most mid- to large- scale SCSI systems are quite expensive.  And
IDE seems limited in the amount of disks supported in a single machine, at
least until serial-ATA is in production.

Any thoughts?  Are there server motherboards out there with "lots" of IDE
interfaces?  Other cheap drive interfaces (FW? USB 2.0?) to look at?

- Orion
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