Budget
 

yes keep on dreaming :p

So, I chose to use the fastest hard drives available, which are the 15,000rpm Seagate Cheetahs. Specifically, I chose to use 240 of them, in 8 30-drive RAID 0 arrays (or RAID 0+1 or 10, if you prefer not to take chances with your data…). These drives are capable of sustained data transfer rates of over 50MB/s each, as I recall. With 30 of them in each array, the bottleneck won’t be the drives themselves, but the PCI-X bus that the controllers are on. The amount of storage space you’d have is another benefit, but was more of a side effect of going for the highest density, highest RPM drives I could find. However, for the record, 240 73.4GB drives have an unformatted capacity of 17,616GB, or 17.616 Terabytes.