Storage problems

[dezt]

We currently have a server with a 20gb partition assigned for students work, which is in my opinion not enough space, as the students are about to start doing video editing and need somewhere to store their movies that they create. I was thinking of buying a hard drive for a server that we have and using that exclusivly for student storage, I was thinking of about 500gb. However, the server I have in mind is a HP ML150 with a SAS controller in it. I was wondering if I could buy a standard SATA drive and plug it into the server?

 

According to HP the hard drives they sell on their site for that server are both SAS and SATA, but I don't know where a SATA drive would go, or how I would put it in.

 

I have a buffalo terastation here but it doesn't integrate with active directory very well, so I don't want to buy another one of those, that is why I was just thinking of putting a hard drive into a server that doesn't do much.

 

Would this be a good idea or can anyone else suggest something that might work better, bearing in mind it needs to be able to assign NTFS permissions to the shares for the students so they don't delete each others work.

 

Thanks

[Ric_]

@dezt: Have you also considered what redundancy is required and how you will back the data up... these are two very important considerations and are often the limiting factor when specifying storage - disks are cheap but backup technologies are not and the time taken to back data up can have a big impact on network load.

 

To answer your questions.... SAS=Serial Attached SCSI (very fast!) and is diferrent to SATA (Serial ATA). You may be able to plug a SATA drive in but then what's the point of having a very expensive SAS controller?

[Geoff]

I'd just swap the SAS drive(s) for bigger ones personally.

[dezt]

@ric I would buy an internal tape drive for backup, making sure it would compress the data backed up to a tape and still have space left over. This would be done using ntbackup that comes with windows server 2003. As for redundancy, i never thought of that, I think i'll look at getting 3 146gb SAS drives and see if I can implement raid 5 on them, 292Gb for about 600 students should be enough, shouldn't it?

 

What do you think? would this sort out my problem?

[crc-ict]

Don't forget that a tape drive capable of backing up almost 300Gb of data on one tape with space to spare is going to cost quite a whack of money! Also, I don't think NTBACKUP works with compression - at least, I can't get it to.

 

I've been looking at solutions for nearly 250Gb of important stuff at home (photographs etc) and for tape I'd be looking at very little change (if any) from £1k!

[dezt]

Ok then, this is looking like a major cost that I just don't have the money for, let's try a different approach.

 

I have a server that has 300GB free space on it, however, this server is a DC and hosts all my logon requests, will this be a problem? or can I get away with putting the Student Files on this server?