On Mon, 12 Jan 2004, Nick Reinking wrote:
Hmm... 4GB Compact Flash cards would be:
Too small (4GB is not enough space, we would need a couple hundred cards)
Wait a sec, those two hundreds cards total 800GB. Are you sure that wikipedia needs that kind of storage? I thought that current articles are a few gigs, and history a few tens of gigs.
Too expensive (4GB cards cost approximately about $1100, or around $330000 for enough space) Too slow (fast access, but only a 5MB/sec read/write) Limit read/writes (they would last about one week, and need to be tossed out)
I agree, Flash cards are not OK for our needs. A server with lots of RAM is much better. Geoffrin would be really optimal, if it worked :(
Someone mentioned $6K for Apple raid storage, but that price is not so high: here at work we have some kind of raid NAS (half a terabyte I think) that went for about $4K. So yeah, NAS can be expensive, a simple internal SCSI raid like our current setup is enough, and with regular backups it can be transferred to another machine in case of need (heck, that's what Brion did multiple times in the last weeks if I am not mistaken, and that's enough proof that it works).
Alfio