Re: 8TB of externalstorage?

Thanks for all the ideas and thoughts folks!

@Richard Lynch:
Speed is pretty low priority.  As another poster guessed, this is just a 
backup system for a bunch of other system. Most of the space will be taken 
up by archives that change very rarely.  Normal nightly transfers are less 
than 100GBs and just need to be done before the next nights start.  Right 
now an old 1Ghz cpu 1GB RAMsystem connected to 2 3ware arrays on a 
100baseT network is doing fine. Write speed is usually about 
40-50MB/second. Usually its Network or CPU bound rather than read/write 
limited.

@Carl Karsten
Yes Its a collection of archives of backups.  After explaning risks to 
participants, the risk of losing the contents in cases of multiple disk 
failure or user error were judged acceptable by stakeholders. *shrug*

@Greg Neumarke Thanks for the BackBlaze link. I've read it and while 
interesting, it doesn't really scale all the way down very well.  I looked 
at "from parts" but when I added in person hours of labor the 
Qnap/Thecus/Drobo black boxes still came out cheaper or about the same. At 
first I thought this route was out as I wanted raid migration and ability 
to add more disks to an array. I was shocked that these are now 
capabilities in madm! Cardinal rule of raid - destroyed.
Linux Rocks. 
Still wasn't cost effective.

Thanks for the links - I'll run the numbers again with the hardware your 
suggesting.

@Timothy J. Wielgos
Budget is around $3K maybe more if need-be but that would cut into 
different projects funding.  I've been looking at NetApp but most of it 
seems pretty rich for this... and I don't know enough about the history of 
the product line to know if the older equipment is still competitive. Most 
of the stuff on sale on ebay seems past End of Support.

I'm just not well versed in the enterprise storage market so don't know 
for sure where to start. We don't have FC infrastructure.  Any specific 
suggestions, or warnings on what to avoid?

@All - very sorry about the long delay in replies.  I follow the list via 
digest and didn't remember to check for a few days :(

Thank you all for your help and advice!

David.
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