When working with a client, we were discussing storage for an application they have developed. Storage price was a key component for success of this product. I read the BackBlaze posts here, and here — but I wanted a mix of cost savings, off the shelf parts, and hot-swappable drives.

The client needed to store data for archive purposes. They planned on deploying multiple nodes, and let the application handle redundancy in various fashions. All we needed to do, was provide cost-effective storage and reasonable write performance.

What we ended up with

• 106TB RAW, 8GB RAM, Xeon 5606, RAID-6 via Adaptec 6405.
• 3 groups of 12 disks in RAID6, for a total of 90TB usable storage.
• XFS to allow a single large filesystem (Ext3/4 limits us 16TB paritions).

The parts list

This post at netacarlson.com is a great read and reference for the details on parts selection.

Comparison of backblaze prices