I'm asking here since this is less about specific drives and more about the big picture and the best way to use resources, which hopefully you enterprise chaps will know like the back of your hand 
Ok, here's the situation.
I've got a server currently with lots of drives in it, 6x1tb of which form my storage pool but there's no redundancy, they are just separate disks with separate shares that I consolidate on my workstation as a few Windows 7 Libraries. On these drives I basically just have TV and movies that I want to keep, so it's not that big of a deal if I lose a drive right now since the data that goes is isolated and can be 'found' again if necessary.
There's also about 500gb on another disk that gets used as backup for my workstation and a few other systems.
My workstation has a RAID0 set of 2x500gb drives. I did this to help improve video editing speed and figured the risk of failure was mitigated since all the important stuff was backed up daily to the 500gb area on the server.
HOWEVER - the storage I use for TV/movies etc is now down to about 800gb free, spread across 6 drives. The chassis I'm using is full both in terms of physical space to mount drives as well as motherboard SATA headers and PCIe headers to run SATA controllers (there are 2 in there at the moment). My workstation (and consequently the backup area) is also nearly full.
Although I have good backups of my important data, I'm becoming increasingly concerned about the time and effort it would take to recover from a failure of the array in my workstation so I want to move away from that. I also want to speed up the video editing situation which is more often than not disk limited.
So. I've got about £1500 that I can justify spending on this, but the less the better. I want to use an SSD in my workstation for the OS, programs and games (about 240-256gb will do). From there I could use another SSD for my profile, docs etc (backed up daily) and as a working area for video projects, which could be archived off to the storage pool once I'm done.
The disadvantage of this, from the editing point of view, is that sometimes I like to mix footage from several different projects which could cause me to run out of space on this working area if I had to move the footage out of the slow network archive to work with it.
So the other option is to build an array on the network that will pump out 300/400/500mb/s and connect over 10G or Infiniband (probably the latter since it's much cheaper at the moment). Whether or not I use this array for the TV/movies as well as my backups AND active working data, I don't know. I'd feel nervous if there's only ever one copy of my important stuff, even if it's on a RAID10 array, so do need to consider an additional disk (or mirror) purely for file-copy backups (but this probably only needs to be 20-25% the size of the storage pool).
I've spent WAY too long thinking about all of this (probably over thinking to be honest) and have put off doing anything about it for probably 12 months now. I'd like something rack-mountable that will eventually sit in a rack in the garage along with some other bits and pieces. Things like the connectivity aspect are slightly lower priority since 1000mbps isn't too bad for the short term. But considerations for drives (size and quantity), arrangement (do I even want RAID?), controller card(s)... it's bewildering.
HELP!!
Ok, here's the situation.
I've got a server currently with lots of drives in it, 6x1tb of which form my storage pool but there's no redundancy, they are just separate disks with separate shares that I consolidate on my workstation as a few Windows 7 Libraries. On these drives I basically just have TV and movies that I want to keep, so it's not that big of a deal if I lose a drive right now since the data that goes is isolated and can be 'found' again if necessary.
There's also about 500gb on another disk that gets used as backup for my workstation and a few other systems.
My workstation has a RAID0 set of 2x500gb drives. I did this to help improve video editing speed and figured the risk of failure was mitigated since all the important stuff was backed up daily to the 500gb area on the server.
HOWEVER - the storage I use for TV/movies etc is now down to about 800gb free, spread across 6 drives. The chassis I'm using is full both in terms of physical space to mount drives as well as motherboard SATA headers and PCIe headers to run SATA controllers (there are 2 in there at the moment). My workstation (and consequently the backup area) is also nearly full.
Although I have good backups of my important data, I'm becoming increasingly concerned about the time and effort it would take to recover from a failure of the array in my workstation so I want to move away from that. I also want to speed up the video editing situation which is more often than not disk limited.
So. I've got about £1500 that I can justify spending on this, but the less the better. I want to use an SSD in my workstation for the OS, programs and games (about 240-256gb will do). From there I could use another SSD for my profile, docs etc (backed up daily) and as a working area for video projects, which could be archived off to the storage pool once I'm done.
The disadvantage of this, from the editing point of view, is that sometimes I like to mix footage from several different projects which could cause me to run out of space on this working area if I had to move the footage out of the slow network archive to work with it.
So the other option is to build an array on the network that will pump out 300/400/500mb/s and connect over 10G or Infiniband (probably the latter since it's much cheaper at the moment). Whether or not I use this array for the TV/movies as well as my backups AND active working data, I don't know. I'd feel nervous if there's only ever one copy of my important stuff, even if it's on a RAID10 array, so do need to consider an additional disk (or mirror) purely for file-copy backups (but this probably only needs to be 20-25% the size of the storage pool).
I've spent WAY too long thinking about all of this (probably over thinking to be honest) and have put off doing anything about it for probably 12 months now. I'd like something rack-mountable that will eventually sit in a rack in the garage along with some other bits and pieces. Things like the connectivity aspect are slightly lower priority since 1000mbps isn't too bad for the short term. But considerations for drives (size and quantity), arrangement (do I even want RAID?), controller card(s)... it's bewildering.
HELP!!
