Damon L. Chesser wrote:
Having done support for a tier1 OEM, I found many of our customers (running Linux) ignored the raid controllers and used them as disk controllers and then used software raid.
This would be fine, I don't really care if it's a hardware or software RAID, although it seems like a waste of money to buy a hardware RAID card just to use as a dense SATA controller. Is there such a thing as a SATA controller just for lots of drives? One that supports, say, 8 or more drives and is supported by the linux kernel out of the box? All I really want is to be able to have big-time data density in a single machine.
...That is, unless someone knows a good and cheap way to have big-time data density outside the machine. The other option I'm looking at is a NAS, but it seems to me that the cheaper solution is to build a storage server myself instead.
My biggest hurdle here is that I have absolutely no experience with SANs or NASs, and I have a short period of time to get my proposal in, so I was planning on going with what I know will work: a big, fat case from rackmountpro.com with a hardware RAID card and 24 friggin' drives.
Michael