On Thu, 2011-12-29 at 17:18 -0500, M.L. wrote: > On 29 December 2011 16:17, Herbert Graf wrote: > > I'm not familiar enough with what kind of hardware you need to support > > what you're doing (I'm not in IT), but based on similar things I've > > seen, you're looking at least $10k. The drives and their housing alone > > will probably use a good amount of that budget (please, don't consider > > consumer drives, they are not suitable for the usage you have planned). >=20 > You'd be surprised - I've seen rack fulls of "consumer" drives at a > well known storage company. I'm not saying it isn't done, Google has been well know for using consumer equipment for server duties. That said, in my experience, if uptime is at all important to you, don't use consumer drives for stuff like this. Aside from the much shorter warranty, they are much more unknown for stability. I've had consumer drives used in very heavy usage scenarios last for many years. I've had other consumer drives very lightly used die after a year. The trick is you never know. Especially when dealing with new models with zero track record, which is going to be the case when having an array that big. If you can put up with failures like that, then go for it (be aware, it's VERY common for drives from the same batch to die very close in time to each other, so a RAID 5 array might be very vulnerable if you only have one hot spare. We once had a farm of machines with Fujitsu drives. We had daily failures. Within a few months almost every single drive in the farm had died).=20 Just my 2 cents. TTYL --=20 http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist .