I am shopping for an array of SAS drives to build a NAS or SAN on my HP Prolaiant 360 appliance with 8 bays. I am using 750gb of data now (on a cheap tower computer I threw together that was temporary - 2 years ago). I think 2TB of data should be more than what I need for a year or two (including copying over my existing data, will give me about 1tb extra to use up). I have 8 bays in my server to use, I thought raid 5 would be good choice, with 1 hot swap. I haven't figured out yet what to do with the BOOT on this server yet, since that partition and it's operating system should probably be on it's own drive to make it easier to manage the data drives, but I lose 1 bay.
So, 7 bays for data, 1 for hot-swap standby, gives me 6 drives of data in Raid 5. 1 whole unit is sacrificed to parity storage, so that leaves me with storage capacity total of 5 drives (if my math is correct). (5) - 500 gb SAS drives gives 2.5tb storage. I was going to buy used drives, probably 10k SAS, since they could probably have a longer life expectancy -vs- 15k SAS. I am only running 1gb network, so without 10gb switches and NIC's everywhere, running super speedy hard drives is just overkill, unless it's just about or equal to the same price.
Can anyone with more experience than me (which is probably alot of people) verify my math here - and give any advice on a better plan and / or save cost ? I am cheap, this is for myself so I do not have corporate unlimited spending cash.
So, 7 bays for data, 1 for hot-swap standby, gives me 6 drives of data in Raid 5. 1 whole unit is sacrificed to parity storage, so that leaves me with storage capacity total of 5 drives (if my math is correct). (5) - 500 gb SAS drives gives 2.5tb storage. I was going to buy used drives, probably 10k SAS, since they could probably have a longer life expectancy -vs- 15k SAS. I am only running 1gb network, so without 10gb switches and NIC's everywhere, running super speedy hard drives is just overkill, unless it's just about or equal to the same price.
Can anyone with more experience than me (which is probably alot of people) verify my math here - and give any advice on a better plan and / or save cost ? I am cheap, this is for myself so I do not have corporate unlimited spending cash.