Slashdot Mirror
Best External Storage Solution for SOHO Setups?
terradyn asks: "Recently, I've been looking for a cheap external storage subsystem solution. Aside from the fibre channel high end solutions out there (IBM FastT, HP EVA, etc.), I haven't been able to find much for the SOHO type market. My current best possibility is this. It provides the capacity and interface type I was looking for (8 bay, ATA6, 1394) but lacks features like RAID5 or NAS type abilities. Has anyone found a better solution with at least RAID5 in a similar or smaller form factor for use in the home (I need the space/speed/reliability for video work)?"
I've recently been looking at the Transtec IDE/SCSI rackmount disk packs. They do tower versions as well, which take up to 16 large IDE disks, with raid 0/1/5 and provide dual host SCSI out. Ideal for getting large amounts of redundant storage at a reasonable price if seek performance isn't critical.
If anyone has used these particular models, I'd be interested in hearing about your experiences...
Sorry. But I don't know what it stands for. Something to do with video?
-Andy
This is primarily what I work with professionally, and in all honesty (at the risk of sounding like a cliche) your best bet would probably be a linux server using an ide raid controller for raid5. Most NAS solutions are nothing more than a Windows or Linux machine with 20 types of filesharing protocols enabled; NFS, Samba, FTP, etc. The advantage to more high-end products is redundancy and support. Loadbalancing NICs and power supplies, dual paths to every drive from 2 raid controllers, etc. The only use I've found for the commercial support from IBM is that the software and documentation for their FAStT products are still being written and are released in piecemeal. With a little bit of know-how, you could build a 1TB ide raid5 SAN/NAS solution using linux (or even windows) for around $2k. Not bad as opposed to $6-8k for Dell's NAS solution, or $150k+ for an IBM FAStT solution.
Not sure exactly what your requirements are but software RAID is easy to do. You'll take a slight performace hit (minor by todays processing standards), but if you were that worried about perfomance that much I doubt you'd be asking about RAID 5.
Is there a reason to rule that out?
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." -- Homer Simpson
It just might be able to be tweaked to double as a mail or web server if needed as well... ;)
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Pick any two.
Being called a dork on Slashdot must be like being called the retard in special ed.
Have you taken a look at 3ware ? ;-). (NO I do NOT work for them, nor do I resell them, just another happy customer).
They make RAID controllers with RAID5 support, all based on ATA-IDE drives, the biggest controller supporting up to 12 drives.
They also support hotswap and all the other goodies you'd expect of a SCSI-RAID-system, but at the price of IDE
There's hardware support for win/linux/freebsd (Not sure about Mac, but I've tried it under the 3 mentioned and it worked like a charm).
How about the dog house?
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
I'm in the same boat. I've been running a 400Mhz Redhat 7.3 machine w/a pair of 120GB WD8MB IDE drives configured for RAID 0 using a Promise Fasttrack Controller. But I'm constantly running out of space and would really like to move towards RAID 5. The HSB Series II is ambiguous about RAID support. It appears that it's software driven - and only available for Win2k and OS X? In any event, I was thinking of building another box using a 600Mhz Redhat 7.3 box + the 3Ware 4-channel RAID controller. The total cost for the controller and 4 120GB drives should be about $700.
Promise makes a whole line of external enclosures that are both rackmountable and desk side. They are resonably affordable. Anything from $600 and up to ~$4000
s p?familyId=6
http://www.promise.com/product/product_list_eng.a
I have a friend that works for a company (Emerging Systems, Inc.) that does NAS. I don't believe that they have 1394, but they definitely do RAID. You might check them out at www.esysinc.com.
I have no sig, does anyone have one to spare?
With the recent adoption of the iSCSI standard, I'd expect to see a lot more inexpensive network storage solutions from commercial providers RSN.
If you have to have it now, then you have to have it now. But if you can wait a bit, you'll probably get a lot more for your money in a few months.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Why in the name of heaven would you need this kind of setup for a Small or Home office???? Do you think a Small office is less than 1000 users????
We have over 40 users at my office and run a Linux+Samba+RAID 1+0 and have no problems. I think you are going into over kill mode.
But I think something like this might work. I know it's not firewire (one of your requirements) but if you're looking for redundancy, just buy two and have them mirror each other. They're certainly cheap enough.
They used to be Legacy Storage Systems, been around for a while. Never used their products though.
Trouble, a mistake or fun, your choice
Quantum's Snap products are pretty nice from the reviews. I think unlike most of the other x86 stuff theirs is based on linux or BSD, if that is important to you. Dell's storage is pretty popular, too. If you're just looking for disks, try the powervault or build it yourself. If you want a rackmount enclosure buy it with as few drives as possible, then fill it with drives you acquire from someone else. Storage like RAM is an expensive upgrade. For just add on storage, with no NAS, you can get almost a TB for about $0.0067 per MB using Dell for the rack and Newegg for the drives going with just Dell is about $0.0075/MB. The totals are $11k vs. $15k.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
$250*1 3Ware 7500-4 (4 drive, raid 0,1,10,5)
$200*1 3Ware RDC-400 (4 bay hotswap enclosure)
$264*4 250GB Maxtor IDE Drives
=$1506 for 1.0TB (750GB Raid 5, hotswap)
You can throw all this into your system if you have 3 5-1/4 bays and a PCI slot free. Or invest in an extra computer and a couple gigabit network cards to make it external.
If you need more space than than then get a 7500-8 or 7500-12 and add more drives.
Being called a dork on Slashdot must be like being called the retard in special ed.
Elegant Linux Raid
Note if you use IE you'll get this:
Microsoft-Free Friday
In support of freedom of choice in browser software, this web site is Microsoft-Free on Fridays. Please use any browser except MSIE to access this web site today.
One option that you may want to look at on the NAS side of things is to look at the Snap Server offering. They aren't exactly inexpensive but supports Windows, UNIX (via NFS or if your Linux/BSD system supports mounting CIFS/SMBFS shares) and Mac. The units come in either small desktop units or rackmount units. The desktop ones usually have one or two drives, thus aren't capable of RAID5, but the 1U units have four drives and support RAID 0/1/5. Most of the older 4000-line and lower units are capable of 10/100BaseT whilst the newer 4000-series models have copper Gigabit.
Another option would be to get a 2U rackmount server with 4-6 hot-swappable IDE bays (I don't have any prices on hand, some can be expensive, some can be had for a pretty good price), an older ATX or MicroATX P-III motherboard and one or two 3Ware low-profile 4-channel controllers (or if you have a PCI riser card, go with the 8-channel version). If performance is required, look at getting a dual Athlon MPX motherboard (using a single processor, two if you want to do data crunching on the box too), drop in a SCSI controller (along with Gigabit Ethernet) and get an IDE RAID -> SCSI enclosure system (as mentioned by another poster, Medea makes some nice ones based on what I've heard) that support the RAID levels you want and probably an internal boot drive loaded with your favorite OS.
So you work for NASA?
Get a low end system these days, with a big case.
Add in a PCI IDE raid card, and four drives. Configure as 0+1 RAID, to get thruput plus reliability.
Through on an old copy of windows, or your OS of choice.
With all new hardware, box is $300, drives ~$400. Good shopping should drop that cost down, or up as your needs demand.
This is my suggestion for about ~600$ (at the most).
1) Look on Ebay for Corpsys HDs. Get the 18.3gb/4mb cache seagate fibre channel 10pack for 139.99
2)Buy from them online 10 FCAL/Copper connectors (10 @ 15.95 ea)
3)Buy a FC HBA - Emulex LP6000 are cheap- get the DB9 connector unless you are going to buy a hub
4)Goto radioshack and buy a bunch of db9 pin connectors (I didn't use the solder type as I figured I could just plug them in)- about 1.50$ each. You'll need to make a terminator,- cross over the data lines and the ground lines.
5)You'll need a separate PSU probably to power up the devices, if you use all 10
6)find a bunch of the little jumper connectors.. you'll need 8 per device (or so, you cna get creative). Jumper the STR1 and STR2, and then the IDs...
Upon bootup with win2k they will be recognized. You can set them pretty much as you want, raid 0/5/1 etc, depending on which flavour of windows you have. With 4 striped drives over 2 hubs that I have, I was getting 1ms seek time and ~37mb thru (via sandra). Let me know how it works out!
How about using IDE hard drives with a fibre channel connection? apple.com has a 720 gig array for abotu $6k, and you could easily add many more drives as there are only 4 that come with it, which allows space for the addition of 10 more IDE drives.
I forgot to mention how hot the drives get- make sure to either get a case or build them on stilts with a large fan in front/ behind them
Personally, I bought 3 compaq hubs (I paid at most 35$ + shipping for them) and a bunch of gbics from techsurplus. 2 fibre optic cables will allow me to connect a machine from upstairs above my garage down to the basement, where I'll locate the drives. Due to my desire to put them all into every computer, I'm gonna either have to get some sort of GFS (I picked up some HP software cheap that might do the trick) or put a box in front of it with 2 HBAs. - one as interface, one as relay. SOrta defeats the purpose of always up storage, but I don't see any good way of resynching a file system
I can provide some more links if you are interested in rolling your own, but I'm sorta sick of getting modded offtopic for a soho file system.
SuperMicro has some astonishing cases ( one takes, with their 5-drive backplane-type things, S-ATA, 15 drives .. Stock!! )...
a pair of 3ware S-ATA cards in a dual-Athlon 'board ( cheapest AthlonMP chips you can get, you'd want 'em for unstoppability, rather than for blitz-performance, eh? ... or go for a pair of the slowest, coolest-running, AthlonXP's and short the correct bridges to MP 'em, though the kernel will run as "License Tainted" then... )...
A batch of Maxtor DiamondMax 9 S-ATA drives Model Numbers Table ( plus spares, and check for the prices you want on PriceWatch ), and one could even bolt one onto the side of the chassis ( drill holes for mounting it on, to get the magic 16-drives )
then use RAID-55
3- or 4-drives == 1 RAID5 unit ( within the 3ware card )
2 of those RAID5 units within each 3ware card
4 such units visible to the kernel, which can therefore give you kernel-raid5 on top of the 3ware RAID, so it'd take multiple-drive failure to kill the redundancy of the array.
( yeah, so it'd be a nuisance to have to hot-plug replace the one screwed onto the side-panel, but just arrange that only the other drives fail, right? Simple!
+: )
Be wary of the Enermax P/S's, though, yes they've got an 800w ( or thereabouts ), but I've read that when fully loaded, they don't supply the proper voltages ( Danish review was it? actual tests, they did, but I don't know if they were de-rating for the 'combined' rails that each are rated to a certain current, but their combined rating isn't the sum... all P/S's are done that way... )
Enermax's, though, are as nearly silent as makes-no-difference when loaded to 50%, though, so that's where I want 'em.
Gigabitten Ethernets would make your place cozier, too, rather than all that burningwire stuff....
( though I gather that there are firewire-to-ethernet translation devices 'round... )
PS... that thing-on-my-head ( in me self-portrait ) was supposed to be a Klutz Propeller Beanie, but it seems they don't make one, now, so now it's only a simulation of one, see...
Messages to/for me ( in me journal )
what's the url for techsurplus? the only thing google popped up was a .co.uk and since you mentioned prices in dollars i'm thinking that's not it...
When you say external do you mean in another box sitting right next to the first box or somewhere that will still be in good and working shape after a fire has destroyed everything in the room where the frst box is now a slag heap, or a tornado has moved that room and the building of which it was part down the street a few hundred yards?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I was thinking along the same lines some time ago and posted a question to the SourceForge Storage Foundry about creating a "storage router" that would run under Linux and be able to route storage requests between any two types of interface (SCSI to IDE, FC to SCSI, etc). The response I got was, "That sounds doable," but nothing else. Not knowing the first thing about either kernel-level development or project management on SourceForge, I didn't pursue it. It still strikes me as a good idea, though...
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011