We ran out of storage space this week on one of our production PACS installations.  We were anticipating this, though the method for expanding the available storage was up in the air.  Dell is basically giving away direct-attached storage these days – I picked up a PowerEdge R200 (4GB RAM), a PERC 6/E RAID controller and a PowerVault MD1000 with 15TB for under $6k.  We installed RHEL 5 and threw it behind the same Gig-E switch our PACS lives on.  After installing netatalk (AFP for Linux), we mounted the volume on our PACS using AFP and moved our 2007 DICOM data to it.  The storage upgrade worked flawlessly.  Our current rate of consumption at this specific site is 2TB/year – so we’re set for a while, at least.

** Keep in mind our radiologists rarely pull priors (based on recent metrics) so the performance hit we take by moving data to NAS is acceptable.  We looked at AFP and iSCSI as methods for connecting the storage to the PACS via Gig-E; because the two protocols compare in speed/performance, we went with what we know a little better: AFP.