NAS

[Dan Yocum]

Sorry to be a Johnny-come-lately to the discussion, but I noticed in the 
ALINKA clustering newsletter that you were discussing something very near 
and dear to my heart: big, cheap RAID arrays.

I've "built" (read as, spec'ed out and had someone else build) 14 large NAS 
boxes for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey here at Fermilab, which totals about 
19TB right now.  That number will grow to about 50TB by the time our survey 
is done.  The CDF experiment just bought ~32TB in 15 boxes.  These all have 
3ware cards and big IDE disks, and you can't be 'em as far as 
bang-for-the-buck goes.  Final price is about half a penny per megabyte and 
they scream - ~100MB/s writes and >200MB/s reads.

Anyway, I wrote up my experiences in a technical note here: 
http://home.fnal.gov/~yocum/storageServerTechnicalNote.html

And the CDF guys wrote up their stuff here:
http://mit.fnal.gov/~msn/cdf/caf/server_evaluation.html

Oh, there's a linux-ide-array mailing list hosted at Univ of Houston which 
you can subscribe to by sending the standard subscribe mail to 
majordomo at lists.math.uh.edu.

Cheers,
Dan

-- 
Dan Yocum
Sloan Digital Sky Survey, Fermilab  630.840.6509
yocum at fnal.gov, http://www.sdss.org
SDSS.  Mapping the Universe.