Nice, a 1.7T of storage (see /. thread) on a consumer PC. For a while I’ve been thinking about doing something similar myself. Here’s the cost analysis:
| Qty | Component | Price |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Enermax FS2000BB (alt: Jinco case) | $330 |
| 2 | Antec True550 550Watt | $200 |
| 1 | Tyan Thunder i7501 Pro (S2721GN) | $400 |
| 1 | Intel Xeon 2.0GHz (533MHz bus) | $230 |
| 1 | 512MB DDR PC2100 ECC | $150 |
| 2 | 3Ware Escalade 7500-4LP | $480 | 8 | Western Digital 200GB Caviar w/ 8MB cache (WD2000JB) | $1920 |
The total cost of this comes out to just over $3700, and running two RAID 5 sets, that’d give you 1.2TB of storage, or about $3/GB. Which ain’t too bad (You’ll pay about $6500 for a 1-1.2TB RAID-5 NAS). Oh, while Apple’s Xserve RAID ain’t bad, their quotes and pricing figures are slightly misleading as they are using RAID 0 (striping, no reduncancy). For RAID 5, multiply their cost/GB by 7/6, and for capacity, multiply by 6/7. (7/5, 5/7 figuring in a hot-spare).
Notes:
- 2 3ware 7500’s instead of one SATA 8500-8 because the 8500’s are effectively the same card. The price is about the same, as is the perfomance. The 2 7500’s most likely would actually perform better with PCI peering as the cards are only 64/33 PCI. At this point, it’d probably be best to wait around for the 3ware PCI-X card or related SATA competition. Of course, if you’re going for SATA, SATA-II will have stuff like native command queuing (!)
- I didn’t give too much thought to the motherboard decision. It’s just based on what has at least one PCI-X slot for future compatibility, and at least 2 peered PCI buses (AMD can’t compete in the server-space because it doesn’t have either!) Went with the Tyan because it was competitively priced and I like the company.
- If we’re concerned about uninterrupted service, you could get a real redundant power supply, which might push your price up by about $1-200 (also, use one of the drives as a hot spare, and get hotswap cages for all the drives). In fact, don’t use this homebrew solution at all as IOPs are rediculously low and consumer drivers aren’t rated for 100% util 24/7 operation
- if you’re aiming for absolute lowest cost, you can go w/ an AMD MP/MPX based chip/board which will shave off around $200. Also, the monster case is mostly for fun (and hot swapping), you should have no problem fitting 8 drives into a normal mid or full tower, which would shave off another $250. You could also go for cheaper drives, which would shave off another $400 or so, bringing your price/performance to about $2.30/GB
- the pricing table is styled w/ adjacent sibling selectors. I would have used colgroup, but it’s way too verbose