[Bioclusters] Urgent advice on RAID design requested

[Tim Cutts]

On 17 Jan 2007, at 12:22 am, Angulo, David wrote:

> You can find 1Tb disk drives for commodity machines on the web now  
> for $500.

He asked for reliability above all else.  I can pretty much guarantee  
you won't get that with a $500 1TB drive.

Storage definitely seems to be a case of "you get what you pay  
for".   We have about a petabyte of SAN at Sanger now, most of which  
is fibrechannel RAID arrays (HP StorageWorks EVA), and some of which  
is SATA or SAS.  The FC disks are much more reliable than SATA, but  
they cost more.   As with all these things, it's a cost benefit  
analysis.  If you want bullet proof, you have to pay for it.  If you  
want cheap, you have to accept lower reliability, and fewer features.

Tim