Quote:
Originally Posted by DNSB
I'd go for 6 or 7 drives to allow a RAID 5 or RAID 6 .
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I used to use RAID 5 with ultra wide & fast 10,000 rpm 20G SCSI drives. HW EISA RAID controller with onboard RAM, on board battery and a big UPS. Later PCI. Any server needs a UPS. Really workstions too; that's the advantage of a laptop. Very noisy and power hungry. It lived in the attic above the bathroom and the noise baffled visitors.
The RAID 5 rebuild time gets excessive with 250G+ drives. A mirror is simpler. Also decent HW RAID controllers for modern drives are not everyday things.
Highest end thing I built was for a college in 1998 or 1999. It had two shelves each with own UPS and each end of each SCSI bus connected to a SCSI buffer to a Pentium Pro with dual channel HW RAID controller. The two Pentium pro servers also on separate UPS. Ran NT4.0 Enterprise with 1st non-beta MS Cluster SW developed by DEC. It was some sort of combo RAID so you could lose a shelf. Maybe RAID 5 per shelf, mirrored?
Now our server lives in a fireproof, waterproof shed, with its own UPS, but that is fed from main Solar + Grid UPS (6000+ Wh). Just a single drive and backups because down time no longer matters. No live services. In the old days the Server handled proxy for Internet, all mail, Windows Update, Print server, and a VPN server for people away from home to securely do email etc.