building a RAID system - 8 drives

[Jeff Layton]

> > How do you stick 2TB in a 1 U server?  I've seen 1U cases with four 
> IDE bays,
> > and the largest IDE drive I've seen is 250 GB.
>
> 8 drives ... 250GB or 300GB each ..
>

   Cool. Do you have pictures? How do you get the other 4 drives
out? I assume they're not accessible from the front so do you
have to pull the unit out, pop the cover and replace the drive?

> > I've got two 4U rackmount systems sitting side by side on the same 
> shelf.  One
> > is a ADIC Scalar 24, which holds 24 100 GB LTO tapes.  The other is 
> a 16 drive
> > server with 200GB SATA drives and two 8 port 3ware cards.  The tape 
> library
> > has 2.4 TB and the IDE server is 3.2 TB.  To be fair, the IDE server 
> is brand
> > new, while the ADIC is around a year old.  If the tape library were 
> bought
> > today, it would have a LTO-2 drive with double the capacity and 
> could store
> > 4.8 TB.  So tapes seem to come pretty close to me.  It also quite a 
> bit more
> > practical changes tapes with the library than to be swapping hard 
> drives
>
> nobody swaps disks around ... unless one is using those 5.25" drive bay
> thingies in which case ... thats a different ball game
>
> i/we claim that if the drives fail, something is wrong ... its not
> necessary for the disks to be removable
>

   Are you saying that it's not necessary to have hot-swappable
drives? (I'm just trying to undertand your point).

   Does everyone remember this:

http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20030425/index.html

My only problem with this approach is off-site storage of
backups. Do you pull a huge number of drives and move them
off-site? (I still love the idea of using inexpensive drives for
backup instead of tape though).

Jeff

-- 
Dr. Jeff Layton
Chart Monkey - Aerodynamics and CFD
Lockheed-Martin Aeronautical Company - Marietta


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