Direct Attached Storage - Dell vs HP?

[Paul Hutchings]

I'm struggling to find any web forums that cover servers and storage and
that sort of thing.

Long story short we have to change a bunch of kit at work including our
main filserver.

Ideally we'd like a SAN solution but they cost a small fortune.

Assuming a SAN is out of the question, we're looking at direct-attached,
and Dell (who we usually buy servers from) don't appear to offer much
beyond external SCSI enclosures which offer about 2TB per cabinet, which I
think we'll exceed.

This got me looking and I've seen HP do several SCSI attached, SATA disk
storage arrays, e.g MSA20

I've not used HP kit before, wondered if any IT types here have any
thoughts on the general HP vs Dell issue?

Also, and I know this is difficult to answer, but how does the performance
compare between SCSI and SATA direct attached arrays in a RAID5 file
serving environment - I'm thinking even on a switched network network speed
is an issue before hardware throughput comes into play?

cheers,
Paul
--
paul <at> spamcop.net