I need to buy/build a server to host our Subversion repository (FYI: I am a dev/not an IT guy). Obviously this is mission critical, and needs to have high network and disk i/o performance. Our repository is currently 5GB and we support 20 devs. The server was going to be Windows 2008, but Linux is an option if it is a compelling and simpler/easier solution.
CLARIFICATION: The 5GB repository is about 2GB source, and yes, it needs to handle 20 devs doing multiple small commits, logs, histories, and checkouts all day long. (How do I clarify source commits? A few C# files here and there, with a few lines of changes? Pretty standard stuff.)
UPDATE: Budget: I was hoping to get by with $2,000 or less, only because I don't think we need to spend that much. However, if it takes $5,000, then that is what it takes. This is our LIFE. But if $2500 gets 100% and $5000 gets 103%, it isn't worth the extra money.
My first priority, of course, is data integrity. If a drive fails, I want to have the machine stop writes and be able to put a new drive in quickly to have the machine back up and running as fast as possible. (I can deal with a few hours of downtime, but not a few hours of "work" during the downtime).
I don't think I need (or want) RAID 5, as the rebuild cost seems to high/complicated.
At a minimum, I could use RAID 1, and have a backup disk (clearly one not from the same batch or even maker ;-)
RAID 1+0 looks like it might be faster? Is it worth the complexity?
Can someone point me to some suggestions and best practices for managing a RAID drive, in particular, whatever solution is offered, how do I manage the disk failure. Is there software that can notify me (email/pager) if a drive dies? Software that will prevent writes to the disk at that point?
Any other things I need to think of?
UPDATE: My Question is this: What are the advantages between hardware RAID vs Windows Server 2008 software RAID for RAID 1+0 wrt speed, management (of a dead disk) and alerts of disk failure.
Thanks