Pls suggest 1 or more reliable vendors for this app

Are you looking for a complete NAS solution, or recommended drives for the storage array? If the latter, Samsung Spinpoint F4 2TB drives are a good choice. If the former, well... adding 12+ drives to a NAS storage unit will be rough.

No, I'm really looking for an answer like, "Check out the Promise website http://firstweb.promise.com, they have an excellent selection of midrange rackmount RAIDs, and you may also want to look at Blivitz Storage Solutions and Acronyms From Hell, Inc. That should be enough."

The thick fog of acronyms in this market is a real barrier to understanding.

Look ... I know this is not the most sophisticated question ever. I also know it has to be pretty easy for you.

But if three vendors is too hard, how about two? I'll even give you one of them, "promise". How about another? Just one more hopefully stable, reliable vendor where I can focus my attention and hopefully learn something.

Thanks.

I can't send you to a specific page because I don't know if you want a network solution or an attached solution, but I have an old one from these guys
http://www.enhance-tech.com/products/ultrastor/

Are you after network storage or storage for a server and, if the latter, how to connect it to the server, out of curiosity.

I haven't used these guys, but they've been on my look-at list for a while: http://www.maxtronic.com/esata-raid . I don't see networked solutions.

Thanks VERY MUCH for the reply! Not being familiar with the various options, I'm in the process of discovering what I want. I am definitely interested in storage for a server, as I'll have to run some services on it. Right now I have an unfortunately somewhat dated 2U server running Windows 2003. As to how to connect, I will find out the answer tomorrow. Thanks again!

Positronicus

To add an additional storage to server, you would need to add a raid controller. Currently there is lots of good PCI-express raid controller, but since you said dated 2U server, I suppose your server has PCIX slot, but not PCI-E.

In anycase, here are my suggestions:

Case #1 - PCI-X slot
If so there scale-able SAS controller is out of the picture, but you can make it work with ability to go up to 20 drives - this means 60TB RAW volume...

1x T10-HR5 - 10 BAY hardware raid RAID
1x eSATA_PCIX

This allows you to connect 2x of T10_HR5 - total of 20x drives (3.0TB supported)

Configure 1st volume as SPAN, then just grow volume of server storage as you need. This will limit the transfer rate to 200MB/sec

Case # 2 PCIE slot
Get a SAS controller and JBOD SAS expander chassis, this allows the server grow up to 128HDD, it can be multiple raid volumes or ONE BIG HUGE volume

Just my $0.02