[lug] Cheap centralized storage

[Gary Hodges]

We have two IDE RAID towers with a SCSI interface that work well.  The
latest tower was about $2700 + $250 to load it with RAM.  We put six 120
GB drives in it using one as a hot spare.

Gary


Orion Poplawski wrote:
> 
> 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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