Want Cheap Storage @ Home?

Okay, I've been asked several times what I use for bulk data storage at home. A lot of the tools I use for production systems are exactly the same and saving money by using commodity hardware at the office is just as easy. (ie if I can create 12TB single-fault reliable array at home for under $2k, then why spend $80k at the office???)

I bought a Norco RPC-4020 ($290) case which has 20x3.5" SATA drive bays with unfortunately flimsy trays in which I've mounted a cheap dual 2GHz AMD Opteron server motherboard with 4 PCI-X (133MHz/64bit) slots from eBay ($120), search "Monarch". The eBay deal included 4GB ECC RAM and a 120GB IDE HD. Then I bought 8x1.5TB Seagate drives ($130/ea for $1060 delivered). I added that with my old set of 6xHitachi 500GB, 6xWD 750GB and 2xSuperMicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 8 Port SATA controllers for $100 ea. After a bit of "Aggie Engineering" getting the Opterons cooled properly in the case (without buying new heatsinks) I assembled the parts was off to the races.

I downloaded and installed OpenSolaris 2008.11 for x86 on the 120GB and then created 3 RAIDZ pools and then created ZFS filesystems on them and shared via CIFS to my Windows and Mac machines. If you're brave, you can stripe/cat your raidzs together, but I left them separate so I can more easily upgrade the 300GB drives to 2TB drives later this year (because you can't remove devices from a zpool).

Total bill after incidentals, about 2 large. Total usable storage space, about 12TB. Total days of nerd fun, about 5.

Next on my project list is to rebuild my Vista Gaming PC for a Solid State disk drive boot and host an iSCSI target on the storage array. Been wanting to do that for a year now...

Notes:

1. I do NOT recommend the 1.5TB Seagate drives. The failure rate on them is high (thanks for noticing RAIDZ). I've RMAd two and updated the firmware to CC1H on the others. (Google '1.5 TB Seagate Freeze') They also do NOT work with the Adaptec 21610SA.
   
2. Some consumer level SATA drives don't like long cables. Even though the SATA spec allows it, when I was using a really nice 3U 12 bay external drive enclosure with 3xInfiniband connections to 2xLSI 3800X SAS controllers but I kept getting intermittent errors. That set me back 2 weeks and almost $800 to figure out. I still don't know if that's exactly it or a problem with the LSI3800X and the Tyan Thunder server MB but I had to scratch and restart on the controller. BTW, I still have those two 8 channel LSI controllers, an Adaptec 21610SA and a Norco DS-1220 laying around.
   

Links:

• NORCO RPC-4020 4U Case
  
• Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB
  
• Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 Controller
  
• ZFS Best Practices Guide
  
• Solaris CIFS in workgroup mode