[ale] Giant storage system suggestions

[Alex Carver]

I'm trying to design a storage system for some of my data in a way that 
will be useful to duplicate the design for a project at work.

Digging around online it seems that a common suggestion has been a good 
motherboard, a SATA/SAS card, a SATA/SAS expander, and then a huge 
chassis to support all of the SATA drives.

It looks like one of the recommended SATA/SAS cards is an LSI 9200 
series card connected to an Intel RES2SV240 expander.

What I'm trying to achieve is continually expandable storage space.  As 
more storage is required, I just keep slipping drives into the system. 
If I max out a case, I just add a SATA/SAS card, use external SATA/SAS 
cables (do those exist to go from SFF-8087 to SFF-8088?), another 
expander and then stretch into a new case.

It's obviously going to run linux or I wouldn't be asking here. :)  The 
entire storage system will probably start somewhere around 10-16 TB and 
grow from there.  The first question would be suggestions for an optimal 
configuration of the disks.   For example, should the drives be grouped 
into say RAID-5 arrays with four devices per array and then logically 
combine them in software into a single storage volume?  If so, what file 
system will support something that could potentially reach beyond 100 TB 
(not that I'd reach 100 TB anytime soon but it can happen)?

Thanks,