Hi,

I'm trying to figure out what is the best way to go for setting up a NAS. It will be used for 2-3 weeks worth of HD Video storage and needs to have a redundant power supply, swappable SATA drives. I'm thinking of using either FreeNAS or OpenFiler as the OS.

We are limited to a small amount of available server hardware in South America. To buy an 8TB HP NAS server costs $11000, quite pricey for us. In Canada I'd just get a couple of Buffalo Terrastations, but that's not an option now.

So I'm thinking of going with an INTEL SR2400 ($550), maybe even two of those for more redundancy. Anyway, I was thinking of using 1TB or 1.5TB drives, but according to other web sources, that's a bad idea with RAID, as it's more prone to hardware errors.

What do you suggest or recommend? Where not cheap, but we want to get the best bang per $.

http://www.usb-ware.com/sonnet-fusio...lier-array.htm

http://www.usb-ware.com/sata-12-driv...re-t12-sr5.htm

Chaining these little NAS units can be done (LVM/software RAID), but the complexity makes as many problems as you are trying to solve.

Your cheapest bet to the Real Thing is to find a Fibre Channel SAN coming out of a data center. An HP EVA 5000 is the better tool for the job.

As much as you may WANT to do it on the cheap, I don't think cheap is going to be very reliable.

I actually have a similar unit to that one... But it deffinitely makes things more complex, in a way. Unless you can decently manage the RAID in those things from a dedicated Linux PC?

The controller is in the box. They are not the best tool for the job. Two of them presented as a software RAID1 on a Linux host might be better, but inferior to a real SAN like the EVA 5000.