Warning : Below thread is not meant for average Joe, unless you know what SAN or iSCSI means - please ignore this one.
Hey Guys, I'd like to share pretty new way/technology to organize your storage system without the need for expensive hardware raid cards, while providing superior performance (easy four times faster at same price) and features found only in enterprise level SAN.
It's called ZFS (Zetabyte file system) originally developed by SUN and was put out into the wild with openSolaris project (now closed), but like any great technology, once it's been freed - you just can't put the genie back into the bottle and there plenty of people and companies highly interesting in this.
In fact it's so good,
NetApp Sued Sun for ZFS Patent Infringement, because comparing core features - you essentially getting most of Netapp WALF Ontap system in addition with even higher scalability.
Here is a tons of reads:
http://blogs.oracle.com/ahrens/entry/what_is_zfs
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3963/zfs-building-testing-and-benchmarking/1
http://www.zfsbuild.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS
Here are few system using ZFS:
https://sites.google.com/site/eonstorage/
http://www.nexenta.org/ and
http://www.nexentastor.org/
(Core has all most features, but no gui, while community ed. has a gui, but limited features and limited at 18 TB (Raw)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenIndiana
Oracle now converted openSolaris to Solaris Express 11 which should be free for non-commercial use.
a Few of mentioned system don't include gui and this is where this little plug-in comes in:
http://www.napp-it.org/index_en.html
bottom line: Yes - you can make a kick-***, super reliable, fast and flexible storage at home without using expensive components.
