On Thu, Dec 29, 2011 at 2:00 PM, Alex Wood wrote: > There are other things to take into account as well. > > The two main things that come to mind are backups and reliability. > > A single server unless it's a 2U rackmount (or greater) designed to > take lots of disks or a tower server (also made to hold a lot of > disks) will not be able to hold 8TB and even if they can it will not > leave much room for RAID (guessing you will need that). > > Reliability is a large area to cover. It would be useful to know how > much down time is acceptable and what your budget is. What OS are you > planning on running and where will your server be stored (do you have > access to a rack). > > So a quick run down of questions you should really know the answer to: > > 1) How important is the data stored on the server? > 2) What is your budget? > 3) What are the storage options for the server? > 4) How reliable does the service being provided need to be? 1) Not mission critical. Not personal user data. No one will die if the server goes down for a couple of days. 2) I don't know yet. I'm in the thinking out loud phase. 3) I need around 8TB of storage, with room to expand the storage space. 4) Need to have reasonable uptime, but it can be taken down once a week (or in the night time) for maintenance if needed. > I agree with C H though. Either set up a VM of the OS you are planning > on using on your comp or install it on a spare comp and get your > application fully set up on there first. The development will be done in phases - the full application will not yet be ready. > For 8TB and assuming people would be pissed if you lost data I would > suggest at lease RAID 1 which requires a RAID card (supplied on some > server and not on others) and double the amount of hard drive space > you will be using, so in your case that is 16TB. How about RAID 5 with hot standby? --=20 http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist .