Take one 3U server from SuperMicro, fitted with an Adaptec 31605 SATA RAID controller and 16 one-terabyte disks. Create a RAID 0+1 array for data storage, with 14 of these 16 disks. You get:

#available storage
[root@sam119 ~]# df -h /data
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb1 6.3T 941M 6.0T 1% /data

#write test
[root@sam119 ~]# dd if=/dev/zero of=/data/toto.txt bs=4096 count=2621440
2621440+0 records in
2621440+0 records out
10737418240 bytes (11 GB) copied, 38.8372 seconds, 276 MB/s

#read test
[root@sam119 ~]# dd if=/data/toto.txt of=/dev/null
20971520+0 records in
20971520+0 records out
10737418240 bytes (11 GB) copied, 31.7011 seconds, 339 MB/s

(See also the previous Geek pr0n entry, complete with JPEGs!)