[Beowulf] Storage recommendations?

[Robert Horton]

Hi,

I'm looking for some recommendations for a new "scratch" file server for
our cluster. Rough requirements are:

- Around 20TB of storage
- Good performance with multiple nfs writes (it's quite a mixed workload
so hard to characterise further)
- Data security not massively important as it's just for scratch /
temporary data.

It'll just be a single server serving nfs, I'm not looking to go down
the luster / pvfs route.

I'm thinking of

- 3Ware 9690 24 port controller with 
 - 20 1TB SATA disks in RAID5 for the data
 - 2 500GB SATA disk in RAID1 for the OS and
 - 2 64GB SSDs in RAID1 for the journal for the data fs.

with 2 Quadcore 3.3GHz Xeon processors and 32GB of RAM

Anyone have any thoughts / suggestions on this?

Thanks,
Rob