I just picked up an AWESOME SAS/SATA controller card http://www.6thstreetshops.com/int-srcsas18e.html for cheap on Ebay, but in the interest of space/speed, should I short-stroke SATA drives or should I be looking at SAS for RAID and then some SATA for storage? The goal is 5+TB, however I get there, and to keep up with the rest of the system (2x8347HE Opterons, 8GB ECC DDR2, currently 4870x2) if I'm outputting from something like CATIA.
What are you going to be using the 5TB for? If its just storing media, SATA drives will be fine and you'll have enough cash left over to buy a SSD or two for your system drive.
He says it's Dassault Systemes's CATIA (very heavy CAD program, used to design whole planes...) so I gess his i/o may be a bit high, but as I don't know the exact requirements for Catia maybe SATA is still enough ? Also, budget ?
I was originally considering using 8x36.4 SAS drives in RAID 10 as a boot/main partition, and then performing dumps to a set of SATA in RAID5 on the motherboard controller. However, should I simply run a large RAID partition and go that way?
catia isn't that much more intensive than Solidworks, there actually virtually the same, except catia has more advanced tools for dealing with mechanical performance of the design. So storage isn't the bottleneck for such applications, just raw processing power. Sure a pair of back to back drives in RAID 0 would help a little in loading the design into the memory, but hardly affect actually working speed of the application. SATA should be fine