The 9316 houses 16 SATA drives connected to dual 8-port PCI-X RAID controllers. It features redundant power supplies and RAID-5 configuration to assure data availability.

The 9316 uses dual 3Ware 9550SX RAID controllers, providing a well-supported, high-performance RAID subsystem. 3Ware reports 800MB/s for the 9550SX for reads and 380MB/s for writes. Performance for the 9316 will most likely be limited by NFS issues rather than the RAID or drive susbsystems.

The 9316 is configured with two sets of eight drives in a RAID-5 configuration with no dedicated hot spares. We assume usable filesystem size will be 90% of raw space (after RAID-5). So, a 9416 with 16 400GB drives would deliver 2 x [(8 - 1)* 400GB * 90%] = 5.04TB. The corresponding capacities for 250GB and 500GB drives are 3.15TB and 6.3TB.

The 9316 includes dual Xeon processors, 6GB of RAM, and integrated dual gigabit ethernet interfaces. The 9316 also features two unoccupied PCI Express x8 and x4 expansion slots (with x8 connectors), as well as PCI-X and PCI slots.

The 9316 runs Debian or Red Hat Enterprise Linux, allowing one to leverage standard Linux protocols for NAS operation.