Re: RAID suggestions?

Michael S. Peek wrote:
Damon L. Chesser wrote:
Having done support for a tier1 OEM, I found
many of our customers (running Linux) ignored the raid controllers and
used them as disk controllers and then used software raid.

This would be fine, I don't really care if it's a hardware or software RAID, although it seems like a waste of money to buy a hardware RAID card just to use as a dense SATA controller. Is there such a thing as a SATA controller just for lots of drives? One that supports, say, 8 or more drives and is supported by the linux kernel out of the box? All I really want is to be able to have big-time data density in a single machine.

...That is, unless someone knows a good and cheap way to have big-time data density outside the machine. The other option I'm looking at is a NAS, but it seems to me that the cheaper solution is to build a storage server myself instead.

My biggest hurdle here is that I have absolutely no experience with SANs or NASs, and I have a short period of time to get my proposal in, so I was planning on going with what I know will work: a big, fat case from rackmountpro.com with a hardware RAID card and 24 friggin' drives.

Michael


Michael,

Alas! I just don't know about SATA controllers. Given your situation, it would appear that your plan is the best one. I would stick with what you know and what you know works. Time is short and your rep is on the line. Beyond that, I would have to let some one more experienced with NAS/custom storage then myself advise you. RAID I feel comfortable with. Talking about big high density SATA controllers vs NAS, I do not.

HTH

--
Damon L. Chesser
damon@xxxxxxxxxx



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