using the sata drives here allows one to easily create a software RAID5 yielding a redundant and massive amount of storage for an incredibly low price per gig.

A little history on my previous storage setups:

March 9th, 2005 

• 4x 250G Maxtor IDE drives ( $139.00 ea. )
• 2x Promise PDC20269 Ultra 133 ATA (PCI) controller cards ( $50.00 ea. )

Raw Storage 1000G
Sub Total of $656.00

Cost per Gig $0.65

September 5th, 2007

•  Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 ST3500641AS 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM, Price: $149.95 ea. x5

Raw Storage  2500G

Sub Total of $749.95, $804.32 total

Cost per Gig is $0.32

Current Prices

• SEAGATE 1tb ST31000340NS stat2 7200rpm 32mb (bare drive) priced $319.90

So using  the same seutp (5 1TB drives ) will give you raw storage of 5TB. Once you put that into a RAID5 you’ll be sitting pretty at 4TB. Once formatted you lose roughly 10% of your space for file tables. This will leave you at 3.6TB

Still pretty expensive, but that’s $1595.00 for 5 of these suckers, or $0.31 per gig

Prices should be dropping when more of these hit the market (and there is a demand ). But it’s still on par for price per gig.

Review of 3 terabyte drives at http://www.barefeats.com/hard94.html

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