I'm a photographer by trade and I've yet to find a method I'm happy with for archiving my work. Currently I'm looking at building a NAS server using OpenSolaris, so I can use ZFS. That way I can take regular snapshots and ship them to an offsite backup server.
A couple questions regarding such a setup. Let's say I get a "NORCO RPC-4020 4U Rackmount Server Case" (Newegg Item#:N82E16811219021) and three LSI LSI00151 PCI Express SATA / SAS Eight-Port Host Bus Adapter, is the performance going to be noticeably better or worst than if I get this "SUPERMICRO CSE-846TQ-R900B Black 4U Rackmount Server Case w/ 900W Redundant Power Supply" (Newegg Item#:N82E16811152124) and only one of the LSI adapters. I will probably start out with 8 2TB SATA hard drives and add them 8 at a time.
The Supermicro looks like it has a much better build, and it has redundant power supplies, but it has a SC846 SAS Backplane w/AMI MG9072 Chip which I'm not sure if it will help or hurt performance compared to connecting each drive separately.
The costs seem to equal out either way I go. Currently my online storage is about 6TB and constantly growing. Right now, they're all connected to my computer directly so it's still pretty fast to search, so going to a NAS device, I'm trying to not lose much performance.
I'm also up for any suggestions relating to this.
(It appears I'm only allowed to make one link, but I included Newegg Part numbers so it's easy to see what equipment I'm looking at.)
Answer
I built a similar configuration for my photography work. I went with a cheaper solution, but am also using OpenSolaris and ZFS.
In summary, even with modest disks (just a mirrored zpool of low-power drives) it's pretty much as fast as having local disks in a workstation. The bigger factor was getting quality Gigabit adapters and a good switch (The initial Netgear switch I used was a piece of garbage).
Remember that even with GigE, your max theoretical throughput is 128 MB/s over the wire, but realistically you'll likely get about 80% of that after you factor in a variety of overheads. Even on my cheap disks in a simple mirror I can get 75 MB/s sustained throughput. In a RAID-Z2 configuration with 8 disks you should be able to saturate the GigE link without any problem.
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