Thursday, September 21, 2006 4:34 PM
AdiOltean
12-disk SATA storage box for less than a grand
ExtremeTech has a review of the Norco DS-1220 eSATA storage box, which can accomodate up to 12 SATA disks. The price is pretty low (on Newegg.com it is $840 without disks).
I computed a small table that shows how much it will cost for a simple JBOD configuration. So, for less than $3000 you can get six terabytes in raw storage (therefore, 3 TB with RAID-10). Pretty competitive, and scales down nicely to whatever your storage needs are.
| Disk capacity (GB) | Total capacity JBOD (TB) | Disk price | Total cost | $/GB |
| 40 | 0.47 | $32.99 | $1,235.88 | $2.57 |
| 60 | 0.70 | $62.95 | $1,595.40 | $2.22 |
| 80 | 0.94 | $36.95 | $1,283.40 | $1.34 |
| 120 | 1.41 | $50.99 | $1,451.88 | $1.01 |
| 160 | 1.88 | $48.00 | $1,416.00 | $0.74 |
| 200 | 2.34 | $59.99 | $1,559.88 | $0.65 |
| 250 | 2.93 | $63.00 | $1,596.00 | $0.53 |
| 300 | 3.52 | $81.99 | $1,823.88 | $0.51 |
| 320 | 3.75 | $86.00 | $1,872.00 | $0.49 |
| 400 | 4.69 | $123.00 | $2,316.00 | $0.48 |
| 500 | 5.86 | $177.00 | $2,964.00 | $0.49 |
| 750 | 8.79 | $338.50 | $4,902.00 | $0.54 |
| | | | | |
| - Disk prices from http://www.pricewatch.com/hard_drives | |
| - Enclosure price: $839.99 from newegg.com | | |
From this table, it looks like we are approaching nicely (and even passing) the theoretical 50 cents/TB limit, starting with around 160/200 GB disks. So, when fully loaded, this array scales down nicely as expected.
The formulas above should be obvious:
- Total cost = $839.99 + 12 * disk_price
- Total capacity (JBOD) = Disk capacity * 12.
