1.2TB = $2k?10:16:39 PM

I know it seems hard to believe in this day and age of 300GB hard drives, but I've run out of hard drive space.  My plan up until now was to keep a bunch of stuff on a RAID 0 RAID 1 (RAID0 is simple striping with no redundency. RAID 1 is mirrored.) 120GB set of drives.  As that fills up, I've been archiving stuff to DVD.  The problem is that I've had to start archiving stuff sooner than I thought and I don't trust the DVDs.  In fact, I've gotten read errors on some already.  They may be fine for video, but I don't want to archive data on them.

I'm faced with a couple of options.  The first option is to half ass it some more and put a couple of more drives into my current computer.  I'm hoping the power supply can take it.  I think I can fit them in there but it may be tight.  Thank god for serial ATA at least.  I don't think I could fit them in with regular old parallel ATA.  A Maxtor 300GB SATA drive is urrently $206 at newegg.  300GB more (mirrored) would be a good start, but I'm sure I'd run out of space sooner or later.

The other options I was thinking about was putting together a storage server and running RAID 5 (stripe set with parity -- it spreads the data across multiple drives but duplicates some of the data for redundency).  I'd like something that I can grow with so I'd like to be able to increase the amount of space for just the cost of more drives.  Here is what I came up with:

• Computer guts:
  • TYAN Tomcat i7210 motherboard ($222)  This is a P4 motherboard with 64bit PCI support. This is the cheapest motherboard with 64bit PCI support I could find.  It also comes with SATA RAID on board if I need it.  Dual gigabit ethernet -- yum.
  • Intel P4 3.0E w/ 800MHz FSB and 1MB L2 Cache ($185)  This seems to be a pretty good price for a fast processor.  Since I'm going to be doing RAID 5 in software it seems worthwhile to pay for a decent proc.
  • 2 * 256MB cheap-o PC3200 RAM (2 * $35 = $70) If it goes bad I can always replace it or upgrade to 1GB.
• Case:
  • CODEGEN "Silver Server" 13 bay monster case ($130)  This thing looks like a beast but the price is right.
  • Supermicro 5bay SATA HDD enclosure ($118)  This is what really brought it home for me.  This is a little cage that holds 5 hard drives in the space of 3 5.25" external bays.  It comes with a fan and a "backplane" for all of the drives.  And you get cool blinking lights and such.  There is enough room in the monster case to fit two of these for 10 data drives total.
  • Antec 550W power supply ($100)  Hopefully this will be enough.
• Hard drives:
  • HighPoint SATA RAID controller card ($204)  This thing can drive 8 SATA hard drives.  That should be enough to get me started.  It uses the host processor for doing the RAID 5 stuff, but it is a lot cheaper than the cards that do RAID 5 in hardware.  Since I'm not all that concerned with speed, the savings should be good enough.  The Broadcom card is another option but it is $100 more.  Tom's hardware did an interesting expriment with these where they drove 32 drives off of one computer.
  • 80GB system drive ($60)  You generally don't want to run the OS off of your data array.
  • 4 * Maxtor 300GB 7200RPM SATA drives w/ 16MB buffer (4 * $206 = $824).  This seems to be a sweet spot in capacity right now. The 250GB drives aren't that much cheaper and the 400GB drives are super expensive.  The Maxtor also comes with a 3 year warranty.

Total price: $1913 plus shipping and software.  I'd probably run Windows as I think I have a legit copy of SBS 2k3 that MS gave me when I still worked there.  It should run Linux fine too if all you want to do is serve files.

With RAID 5 this will give me ~900GB of redundant storage.  I can easily double the size with another hard drive cage and a set of drives ($942).  This seams like a pretty wild deal to me.  Sure it won't be the fastest thing out there but it is pretty darn cheap for a ton of storage.  I probably won't drop the money on something like this for a while, so I'm expecting it to just get cheaper.

So, am I missing anything?  Is someone going to come out with a turnkey system for half the price?  The closest comparable thing I could find where the NAS systems that various people are selling.  Nothing could touch this setup on price.  I looked at the Apple XServe (I do love blinking lights...) but they start at $6000 for 1TB and require fiber channel.  Way overkill for me.  There is also something like the LaCie terrabyte drive ($1000).  This seems like an amazingly bad idea to me.  They must 4 drives in there.  If one fails you loose all of your data.  The chances of loosing all of your data is 4 times as likely.

I like pricing out stuff like this even though I may never buy it :)