Heh ... Chris beat me to it. Chris Dagdigian wrote: > > Reliable? With a single power supply? That may be a good home NAS box Single points of failure do not reliable units make. Our JackRabbit box has N+1 powersupply configs, multiple redundant gigabit ethernets, and lots of other goodies. Reliable usually means redundant and at least resilient to single failures. RAID is *not* resilient (yes I know what the "R" stands for) unless you have multiple paths to the disk such that a single controller failure or single disk failure (or single network, or ...) takes away your data. Unfortunately it is very hard to do this "cheaply". It can be in-expensive, but you have to pick what features you want and which ones you can live without. For (smaller) clusters, unless you have other compelling business issues on time-constrained access to data, often times a good NAS appliance may be sufficient. Unfortunately most NAS units do not scale in performance (JackRabbit does, but I am resisting letting this message become a commercial for it). For better resilience, if your business case demands it, replication of data across multiple units is usually a good idea, so loss of single boxes (iSCSI bricks or JackRabbit) does not impact data accessibility. You can get cheap or reliable. You get to pick one (today). Usually you get to pick reliable or fast, but you can have both with the right product. Joe -- Joseph Landman, Ph.D Founder and CEO Scalable Informatics LLC, email: landman at scalableinformatics.com web : http://www.scalableinformatics.com phone: +1 734 786 8423 fax : +1 734 786 8452 or +1 866 888 3112 cell : +1 734 612 4615