Help with image server

[jmatt]

I have to set up a lab environment where users will be able to store and retrieve their drive images. I plan on using Ghost for the image backups.

Does anyone have any recommendations as to what hardware I should use for the image server? Of course, it'll need a few huge, fast drives. Any recommendations? Is SCSI faster than other drive types? My budget is limited, is SCSI worth the extra money?

Any recommendations for a fast motherboard? The CPU doesn't have to be anything special since disk access isn't CPU intensive, yes?

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks
John

 

[lhgpoobaa]

in a word no.

You have stated that you are on a budget and need capacity. Those two statments wont be scsi.

The greatest scsi drive capacity is 147Gb in the 10k rpm drive... and for the price of one of those you can buy 2 or 3 200Gb IDE drives.

So your best bet is some SATA raid card with a number of IDE 7200rpm drives plugged into it.

anything from 20Gb to 250Gb is available today, so you have alot to choose from. I advise using a RAID1 array. This requires twice the number of drives but give you redundant data should one drive die.

I also reccoment the W.D. JB range of drives. About the fastest IDE drive you can get, and with a nice long 3 year warantee.

As for the system... anything really. Something cool and quiet maybe like a P42Ghz or low end AMD XP cpu.

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