Good point! I'm a bit of a noob when it comes to RAID, I've put 2 SSDs in RAID before but no other experience Anyway, since 10GbE seems to be the future, I think I'll invest in it maybe I will buy a dual NIC for some link aggregation goodness
With a controller which can do it in hardware (the overwhelming majority these days), RAID6 > RAID50 in every way. With SSDs though, RAID5 is more than safe enough, because the OP is backing up all of his important data, right?
Hmm, after considering what you guys have said about redundancy, only my apps, games and OS will be run on RAID0'd SSDs, over 10GbE. Since this is unimportant, downloadable data, redundancy is irrelavent. Then, for storing important data, there'll be a 12 disk RAID10 array of 3TB disks , which will use Gigabit. This way mass, redundant storage is combined with raw speed and basically, There'll be 2TB of SSD space, and 24TB of Mechanical disk space BTW, I'll be using a hardware controller for sure
As much as I like your project, I would not, ever, consider having the OS disk on a remote system. As good as ethernet is (fiber channel is better), latency will always screw you. By all means, put the mechanical HDDs in the remote system, but not the OS SSD(s).
You have way too much spare cash to afford all that Personally I agree, sticking a decent RAID card into a workstation is far easier and cheaper, but hey if you've got money to blow why not...
Hmm, well since I have a spare computer lying around, and 4GB PCI-X FC HBAs are dirt cheap on ebay, I will buy 2 and experiment a little, before spending £2500...
I agree with this entirely! A couple of SSD's in RAID 0, as a boot drive, in your main machine and then have your high speed SAN for fast data storage. But definitely get some pictures up if you do this! I very much enjoy reading about hardware that is a little bit different. What components are you thinking of using for your SAN? I built a Fiber Channel SAN recently using a couple of Emulex HBA's, it worked quite nicely but I didn't fancy having another machine running all the time in my house so I will also be sticking a 10GB card in my regular server and run that to my desktop Linus from LinusTechTips covered this in one of his videos too http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bu6jlA7hPj8 Also I don't know if NCIX Canada will ship internationally but 10GBe adapters are $279.99CAN! Probably the cheapest you will see them for a while! http://ncix.com/products/?sku=80333
Since I'll be doing RAID in hardware and be using HBAs, only very minimal hardware is required to run OpenFiler - I'll be using AMD FM2. While you say it's unadvisable to boot from this, I'm still going to try anyway, simply for fun, and craziness
