We will be setting up direct storage, consisting of 450GB drives, in RAID 5 to store and serve 4TB of aerial photo projects. We need almost all the disk space so I was wondering just how full is too full? At what percentage full does performance go down. Storage is not my specialty as you can probably guess.
I'd like to configure the 12 disk enclosure as one RAID 5 with 11 disks and a spare. Others feel that 11 drives is too many and that we should configure it as 2 5 disk RAID 5 arrays. Part of their logic is that if we lose 2 disks at the same time we only lose half the data. And therefore only need to restore that half. Can anyone point me to a white paper on best practices for setting up storage?
The datacenter we are forced to use has never dealt with a project like ours. Their business model is not designed for large volumes of data. The yearly cost for storing our data on the data center SAN is such that the direct storage pays and support pay for for itself in less than a year. Don't you just love government
We also can't aford the $3.50 per GB to backup the data to tape so we are purchasing a second inclosure which will be filled with 1TB SATA drives. We will be using 2nd enclosure for backing up the data. This is not how we want to do things but it is our only option short of not doing the project in the first place. BTW, the nature of the data is that it never changes.
