Quote Originally Posted by beng
G'day cyberygan,
Just out of interest, what sort of performance are you getting from 14x73GB?
Which controller card?
I have been given a chance to buy an old Netapp filer with a zillion 36GB disks at a pretty low cost, so I have been considering what I can do with it :-)
We use Dell rig. SC1425 with single 3.2GHz CPU, 2GB RAM, Adaptec 39320 dual channel SCSI U320, and Dell 220s storage. We originally configured 220s as split bus and used both channels on the 39320. Performance was terrible. Only got about 10MB/s on NFS. Switching the 220s to joint bus mode and using only one channel on 39320, we were able to get 30 - 50MB/s write on software RAID6. We didn't run any real benchmark, just used dd to do some write tests. The split mode issue was counter intuitive, but it did confirm other users experience. We didn't try two 220s on both channels of the 39320, so not sure if it was the 39320, or the 220s that couldn't handle dual channels well.

Netapp shelves are probably not worth it. Last time I heard that their HDD are formatted differently, you will have trouble in a non-Netapp setup.