You may remember that I posted about SANMelody enabling a low cost SAN not to long ago.  I decided to put together a box to test it out with and finally have all the parts assembled.  I will hopefully be installing an OS on it this week.  I ended up going with:

• SuperMicro SC933T-R760: This is a 3U case so you don't have to use riser cards for your add in cards.  Includes a 760W 3way redundant power supply, 14 SATA drives trays with backplane and rack rails. $907
• SuperMicro X5DPL-iGM: This is an extended ATX motherboard with dual Xeon support, up to 12GB of memory in 6 x DIMM slots, 1 x 1Gbe, 1 x 100Mbe, 3 x 64bit PCI slots, 3 x 32bit PCI slots. $338
• Intel 2.4 Ghz Xeon: I picked up two of these. 533Mhz front side bus. 2 x $200
• 2 x PC2100 1 GB DIMMs ECC 2 x $150
• 3Ware Escalade 8506-8: 8 channel SATA RAID controller with 64bit PCI interface. $475
• Western Digital 250GB 7200RPM 8MB Cache SATA Drives: To be quite honest I was looking for capacity over ultimate performance here. Normally use Seagate Barracudas but have had quite a few fail lately and the price per megabyte was poor. 8 x 170.

That was it.  $3780 for a machine with 2 terabytes of disk space and decent performance.  I can actually remember paying almost a million dollars in a previous job for 1 terabyte!

I will let you know how turning this into a SAN goes.

Sunday, April 25, 2004 10:41:10 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [2]