Cheap home mass storage?? (was - RE: [wplug] OT - word of warning on Maxtor 250GB drives)

Michael Semcheski lists at immuneit.com
Wed Feb 15 09:53:06 EST 2006


Vanco, Don wrote:
>  So I should ask - does anyone have any ideas for cheap home mass
>  storage (above 2TB)? ...
>  Any comments?  I'd love to find 3 to 5 TB (JBOD even) at under 5
>  grand.....

Here's what I did:

Get a SuperMicro 16 bay enclosure. ~$900
Get an Adaptec 16 port SATA RAID card.  $~900
Get your motherboard, CPU, RAM.  Nothing fancy.  $200.

So there's $2000 and you're set with a RAID enclosure that can hold 
about 16 drives.  Lose a drive for hotswap, and about three for parity.  
If you buy 400GB drives, my back of the napkin calculations show you can 
get about 4.8TB.  16 drives * $250, is about $4000.  But, if you buy 
them in chunks (4 or 5 at a time), by the time you need the second 
array, the price will have come down, and by the third array, you may be 
looking at about $200 per drive.

So that's 4.8TB, for $6000.  Tough to beat.

Mike
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