Recent storage technology (perpendicular recording) brings hard drives into new regions of capacity. Have a look at the Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 750GB SATA II model and you might realize that this baby allows you to build real big file servers at ease. As the drive comes at 335 Euro (august 2006) it is still more expensive than using 250GB drives, but the big plus is, that you don't need that much drives to build a really large file server that satisfies your ever growing capacity needs for quite a while.

Putting a new linux on the box that fully supports the AB9 Pro you can now easily build a file server with 9+4=13 drives with 750GB each which sums up to a usable capacity of 9 TB (raid 5) or 8.25 TB (raid 6). This all is based on consumer pc products with quite reasonable price tags. What really makes the solution shine is that the expected throughput of this system will be outstanding. All SATA controllers are bound via PCIe to the processor and even the gigabit ethernet channels are on separate PCIe lanes. Therefore, the pain of having a PCI bottleneck of 133MB/s for all the drive and ethernet traffic is history. From my point of view the new drives in combination with PCIe SATA, the new intel processors, and ABit's AB9 Pro offer impressive capacity and throughput on an unmatched low price.