2. There seems to be different levels of board; for example the 100MHz small system and the high-end boards that can handle up to 16 drives. Can you address recommendations on *both* ends of the spectrum? Are there eother product catagories?
3. Please support statements of opinion with evidence of fact. "You are wrong." is an opinion. "3ware boards did not have a fast chipset until the 7xxx series." is a more factual statement. "I run 3ware boards with 16 disks in a production environment" is a statement of fact. What conclusions we draw from that are opinions. :)
I run a 12-drive 3Ware 7500-12 card at home, bought from www.newegg.com recently for $560. The card has 12 single-drive channels for 12 drives, and I currently have 6 x 120GB drives hooked up (also bought from Newegg for about $90 each). Since 120GB (decimal, 120,000,000,000 bytes) actually equals about 110GB binary, that's 660GB raw capacity. One drive lost to parity calculations and a second left as a hot-spare leaves a 440GB RAID-5 array that S-M-O-K-E-S. Really really really fast is all I can say. :-) And Linux sees the 3Ware card immediately on boot-up and install, it's perfectly well supported, good solid hardware RAID.
I chose the 12-drive card so I could now install a 6-drive array. Later on, when it looks like Parallel ATA development is winding down, I'll install 6 Very Large Drives [tm], which will likely be 400GB or so each for a parity, hot-spare, and 1.48TB usable. Finally, when those VLD's are getting cheaper, I'll move my data off the small array onto the big one, and put another six VLD's onto the array so I have parity, hot-spare and 3.7TB total usable on 12 spindles. By then the 120GB drives will go into "old" desktops as secondary storage.
That's my recipe for growable, cheap, fast, reliable RAID for home or small business.
For those of us new to some of these things, what sort of enclosure would you use for a larger (4-8-16) disk set?
I currently have a mongo-huge (technical term, sorry) SAG Electronics full tower case (www.sagelec.com) for the six (6) RAID-5 drives and the four 18GB SCSI drives in a RAID 0+1 configuration on which the OS resides. Later on, when I have the money and the space for the additional six RAID-5, I'll make sure to go for a rackmount case even if it's only so I can put that bugger on a shelf and not have it take up half my study. :-)
Other case recommendations welcome!
-- Rodolfo J. Paiz rpaiz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://www.simpaticus.com
