Guys, here is a challenge for you...regarding hard disks

[IanB]

OK. This is the problem. You guys have to come up with ...

Uh, why? Hasn't this been covered over and over in this forum?

But for what it's worth:



The arrows show the direction of information requests. As long as those don't point to partitions on the same physical disk, you'll get max speed by minimising seek times, and data in those requests can stream in parallel as it is going through different physical on-disk controllers. Each "drive" in the diagram could be a multiple-disk RAID array for even better throughput. If you aren't using an offboard RAID controller card, consider mirrors or RAID 0 for all for 6 disks total. The initial partitions (C/P/T) on each drive are relatively small (10-15% max) so you get a short-stroking bonus accessing data on those partitions for even faster access times for the most critical files, OS and program data.

Now just work out the amount of archivable data you want to store of each type (frequently accessed eg. torrents, infrequently accessed eg. backups, etc.) and that gives you the minimum sizes of the disks you need, as long as you keep those initial partitions no more than 15% of the total.