Two 1.5TB Seagate 7200.11 drives on the ICH10R in raid 1 make a nice setup. The ICH10R is an on-board semi-hardware raid controller making it a very cheap option to use in any home server. The Seagate 1.5TB drives are one of the highest capacity drives readily available in Q1 2009 and have the best price/GB available. Raid 1 is probably the best way to gain redundancy when there are two disks in the system.
As one can see from the above image, over 100MB/s transfer rates are possible from these drives, which is enough to saturate one gigabit ethernet port. What many people forget is that on a storage server, unlike a database or application server, one is oftentimes limited by the network interface “card” (NIC) throughput.
Since the 1.5TB Seagate drives can be found for $90-120 in the first quarter of 2009, and offer tremendous storage capactities, they will be used as the basis for much of this site’s discussion.
