Think smart about your storage. (Score 1)

Dovetailing on others comments; you've given almost no parameters around your 1TB requirement. I'm in the storage industry but will spare you the 20 second commercial. Here are some things to think about.

Threadedness: How many threads will simultaneously be fetching data? Lot's of threads likes lots of heads, meaning more smaller disks vs. few big drives. If you are in prepress or imaging and it's just you, then stick with a bunch of big drives. Seagate's new 73GB drives are FAT data movers. Great sequential access.

Do the threads look at common data or is the data very wide spread and the incidence of looking at the same data twice rather small. If you aren't going to look at the same data very often then cache is of little use to you and furthermore, if your sever has any beef to it at all, then use software RAID.

Hardware controllers add latency. It's rather humorous that a simple software RAID on JBOD which costs perhaps half of a hardware solution is twice as fast as those big Refridgerator RAIDS with all the gizmos in them. Cache lookups and XOR operations and other overhead just gets in the way. The guys that make those fridges will never admit to this. Stay away from fridges with cache if you are doing data-mining, have a BIG data base, are doing decision support or pre-press/imaging. Also, if you are streaming writes, forget about the refridgerators, you end up filling up their cache and then you pay heavy latency costs.

Hardware RAID is best when you have Junior System Admin's who can't formulate a storage plan and keep it up to date thus confusing everyone, or when the I/O justifies it, smaller databases, home directories and other shared storage etc, or added value storage like some of the new SAN devices that you will see being anounced this summer that mitigate the Latency with other value added features. Sometimes peformance isnt' everything, just mostly! =)