RAID Machine
Before I build some awesome temperature telling device (rather useless — but novel and cool), I really need a RAID. To be presise I need alot of harddrive space on my network. I’ve been jugling several hundred gigs of audio & video files around on external harddrives and its getting a bit tedious now — I had to write up a perl program just to invintory all of what I had and where it was stored. If your wondering, no its not hundreds of gigs of illegal MP3’s (I used iTunes — well — when its not FUBAR — and am very legal now) — its hundreds of gigs of Anime that I download off of bittorent (legally — as it it not licensed in this country). On top of that I have alot of pictures that I take, my legal mp3’s (or mp4’s as the case may be), and other goodies — I’m a data packrat.
Long of the short is that I went to NewEgg and priced out what I would need to build a really really nice RAID (the kind that I could never afford — but work might let me buy ^_^). I call this machine “under a buck a gig” because thats what it ends up at. It specs out with a 4.4TB RAID 5 (12x400gig) and costs about $4,200. Here’s the detailed list:
- $203ea x 12 x Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD4000KD 400GB 7200 RPM Serial ATA150 Hard Drive — OEM
- $172 x 1 x Kingston ValueRAM 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 533 (PC2 4200) Unbuffered Dual Channel Kit System Memory Model KVR533D2N4K2/2G — Retail
- $170 x 1 x TYAN S2865ANRF Socket 939 NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra ATX Server Motherboard — Retail
- $140 x 1 x AMD Athlon 64 3000+ Venice 1GHz FSB Socket 939 Processor Model ADA3000BPBOX — Retail
- $700 x 1 x 3ware 9500S-12 PCI SATA Controller Card — Retail
- $500 x 1 x NORCO DS-1200 Steel 3U Hard Drive Storage Rackmount Chassis — Retail