Bill,
Easily. But... (I am ignoring SCSI as an option here since SATA discs are
currently larger and probably lower in cost). I would suggest SATA as even
though RAID controllers are available for IDE (PATA), IDE is on its way out,
SATA is coming in strongly and in a year or less you may not be able to buy
a new computer motherboard with IDE.
You can get an 8 port SATA controller and 400GB SATA disc drives (Hitachi I
think). So from one controller you can have 3.2 GB (manufacturers units) of
storage. This may be closer to 3.0GB by the time you format the discs. So,
you will need a minimum of 5 drives. If you only want "volume" then you can
install extra IDE controllers and load them up with the largest IDE drives
you can find, but read on...
There will be logistical problems. 5 drives generates some heat and occupies
some space. If the drives are crammed up together without consideration they
will get hot and deteriorate quickly, so good mounting and cooling is
important along with a more than adequate power supply. A separate box is a
good idea, or minimum a large Full Tower / Server case with heaps of good
airflow is essential. (You will no doubt have floppy, CD / DVD / other bits
and pieces too).
How will you backup this data? Large capacity tape drives are readily
available, but expensive. How will you get the data loaded and how long will
this take? The longer it takes and the more value there is in the data, the
greater the consideration towards using a fault tolerant storage system
along with a quality backup system. This adds up.
The 8 drive controller referred to above is a RAID controller (3ware rings a
bell here, there are several manufacturers of such raid controllers -
www.tomshardware.com did some reviews recently). You can create a low cost
fault tolerant system easily with RAID 5, although write performance drops a
little but should be of no concern. You will need 1 extra disc to create a
RAID 5 array and should consider a Hot Spare discs in case one fails. (If a
disc drive lasts 5 years then with 5 you have a good chance of one failing
each year for 5 years - not a correct way to look at it, but the
probabilities of a failure do add up). The cost of recreating the data and
the time taken just to restore such a volume will greatly outstrip the cost
of the raid controller + extra discs.
Consider the amount of time it will take to back up that volume of data,
then if a problem occurs, consider the amount of time it will take to
restore such a volume of data. 30 MB / Second is a good speed for a tape
drive. 2500 GB (2.5 TB) is 2,500,000 MB, divide by 30 --> 83,333 seconds = a
huge amount of time!!!! > 23 hours. So, it would be best to be able to
backup the data in increments and retain a separate identical copy on
another machine to archive - one way anyway.
So, do you actually need 2TB of disc space? There is no practical storage
limit in Windows.
HTH
- Tim
