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In term of scalability of performance and price, what would be better for a small business with around 20 users. I am targeting around 45TB of storage via SAS.

Here are my options:

  1. Buy 2 JBOD enclosures and install 1 RAID controller card to my file server
  2. Buy 2 RAID enclosures and install 1 non-RAID controller card to my file server
  3. Buy 1 RAID enclosure + 1 JBOD enclosure and install 1 non-RAID controller card to my file server

Would it make a different if I were to choose iSCSI or Fiber?

Dat Chu
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1 Answers1

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20 users doesn't tell me much. 20 office clerks will handle data a lot differently than 20 video engineers. Same with databases. Storage can be tuned to a variety of purposes. If your goal is "lots of space, as cheap as possible without much downtime" that's one thing. If you have performance demands, that will impact the calculus.

I lean against iSCSI for something this size. Unless you can lever 10GbE, that is.

Your sizes suggest you're considering 2TB drives, which further tells me they'll be 7.2K RPM drives. For performance you want as many spindles in your volume groups as you can get. That suggests the RAID card + 2 JBOD enclosure route. However, if scale is more of a problem than performance, the Card + 2 RAID enclosure route will provide better scaling.

sysadmin1138
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