I'm a newb to Linux, please be gentle. I am old fogey when it comes to DOS and Windows environment and prefer a command line interface to a GUI any day.

My objective is to create a share, visible to all systems on the network, 6 in total, with at least 8 Tb storage space, expandable to 16 or so using 2 TB HDDs.

All systems on the network are gigabit LAN, no wireless allowed. All systems have static IP addresses and are running XP Pro SP3. The local systems will be running the XP backup utility and storing the images on the backup server.

Hardware available:
SuperMicro P3TDLE dual processor board
PIII @ 1.16 GHZ
1 GB Memory
SuperMicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 8 port SATA II PCI64 controller
Intel Pro 1000 XT PCI64 gigabit NIC

Software:
Fedora 16, installed on a 300 GB hdd running static IP address.
Samba software.

That is where I am right now. What is my next step?

Thanks,

Bob

You will want to use RAID for redundancy. RAID 5 will use 1 drive for redundancy for every 3 drives, so 6 2TB drives will provide an 8 terabyte raid-5 volume. You might want to use RAID-1 for the system for mirroring. Or you could carve out a partition on the raid 5 array and use 8 2 TB drives. That will allow a 16*2/3 TB volume, minus. the system partitions.

You will want to research whether there is a share size limit that Samba or WinXP support.

I think I may have found a cheap and easy solution. I'm going to stay in the XP Pro world and use a spanned volume. The maximum size on a spanned volume is 64 TB. I am aware this provides no fault tolerance but this will be a storage volume for the primary servers to store their images.

Thanks for input.

Bob