[EricGT]

The thing that surprises me is the storage solutions I see some of you describing. I've always assumed that interaction with the hard drives would be the bottleneck. I spend a lot of money on really fast RAID systems. My current box has an Adaptec 3805 SATAII RAID card, with 8 Seagate 7,200RPM 750GB SATAII drives, in a RAID 10 configuration. The setup is fast as hell, with decent fault tolerance. This saved my butt a couple of days after I deployed this brand new box. A contractor at my data center arced something in the power box supplying my cabinet and spiked the box. One drive was taken out and the RAID card was damaged, but the system kept running after a restart (albeit with a fair amount of complaining) until I could get down and replace the damaged components. I have drives that big because they weren't much more than the smaller ones and because I am about to start offering image hosting.

What do you guys think is the bear minimum hard drive setup required to run a busy vB system, with both acceptable performance and fault tolerance? Also, what type of external storage is fast enough to use with a vB DB server? Eric