Cheap RAID system recommendation?

Hello *.admin

We are using a Sun's StorEdge A1000 in a Sun E3500 which happens to be extremely stow. Before we realized that it was so slow, we planned to buy a second one, but now we are looking for a different Raid system. The problem is that due to administrative reasons, we are not allowed to spend more money than it was once planned. So we are looking for an alternative that won't be more expensive that about 30 000 US$.

This is what we need:

• sustained transfer rate > 70 MB/s (not on paper, but *measurable*)
• fastest SCSI flavor available (fiber channel would be way to expensive)
• disks with 15000 RPM for small latency
• 400 GB capacity total, equivalent to 200 GB in a Raid 10 conf.
• no special features except a battery buffered cache
• greater number of spindles are preferred over bigger disks

This is a quite modest system I think. Be aware that a very fast system could even be inappropriate for this old fashioned machine (4 SPARC 2 CPUs at 400 MHz), but of course, latency can never be small enough for scattered I/O operations.

Would you recommend any specific modell for the mentioned machine? Dell? IBM? HP?

Comments about your experience with different models are also welcome.

Thanks

Rick

PS: By the way, nowadays some disks are so fast, that they can almost reach a sustained transfer rate of 70 MB/s in single mode! Received on Sun Aug 18 2002 - 12:46:49 CDT