Recently on the My Movies forum there was a thread added about a huge 48TB NAS that is being constructed by one of the members over there; it has a ton of great data on his project around performance, power consumption, etc.
I have been running a smaller and slightly older configuration for several years now, I have blogged about it several times but I figured I needed a post where I could continuously update its every changing configuration, so here I go hardware wise we have:
1 x AIC RMC3E2-PI2 /w Reduntant N+1 650W PSUs
1 x Tyan Thunder i7525 (S2676)
2 x Intel® Xeon® Processor 3.0 Ghz /w EMT64 and HT
12 x 750GB (3.75TB) Seagate SATA II
1 x Areca 16 Port SATA-II to PCI-X /w 1GB cache (non-ecc)
4 x 1GB (4GB) PC2-3200 DDR2 ECC Registered
1 x 100GB 2.5" SATA II Hitachi OS Drive
1 x 250GB 3.5" SATA II Maxtor Swap/Temp Drive
2 x Open Cable Receivers
1 x Pioneer DVR-K17
This machine is currently running x64 VISTA SP1, its set up with a dedicated 100GB NTFS OS partition/disk and another 250GB NTFS disk/partition for the swap file and the recorded tv/live TV buffer.
The RAID is set up in a RAID 6 coniguration which leaves me about 7.5TB of storage; this allows me to have two drives fail at the same time without concern.
I originally started this machine with 250GB drives in RAID 5, I then migrated to 500GB drives in RAID 5 and as you can see am now at 750GB drives in RAID 6; the Areca controller has been great since it supports online capacity expansion and dynamic re-build I have had 99.999% availability of the RAID partition since I put the machine together (that includes one drive failure/re-build too!).
Many have asked me why I do not run Windows Home Server (WHS) on this configuration, I would actually love to but this machine plays double duty for my home, it is both my NAS and my MCE machine (we use extenders exclusively for all video/audio content in the house) and doing so would require me to have a 2nd always on machine which I am not prepared to do at this point.
On that topic, I have considered running WHS or MCE in a virtual machines to get both configurations working on the same hardware but I frequently run at 80% CPU utilization when doing video work on the same box and without a hardware upgrade I could not do this in a hiccup free way.
Another related question I get is why RAID and not the redundancy model used by WHS, well for one I did this system in 2004/2005 timeframe and there was no WHS and two that model gets expensive when you get above a few discs, I also like that my redundancy is rooted in a enterprise grade hardware that is independent from software since I do lots of selfhosting on this machine.
If you want to see a picture of this machine, one is here.