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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...
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).
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
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http://www.promise.com/product/product_list_eng.a
Small office home office. It's also a burb of NYC, but I think he was meaning the other one.
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."
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.
Elegant Linux Raid
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Let's start by building a barebones system for our server. Motherboard, CPU, RAM, video card and NIC in a decent case. None of this needs to be top of the line just to run as a SAN solution, so we can opt for a slower celeron CPU, low-end video card, etc. Rather than picking specific components, let's estimate this to be around $300-400 with a decent size power supply in the case. Next we'll add a 3Ware Escalade 7500-8 ATA RAID Controller for $470, and 6 Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 200GB 7200rpm hard drives at $279 each. This gives us an even terrabyte of ide raid5 storage for $2144 plus the price of the original barebones machine, so about $2500 total.
I forgot to mention how hot the drives get- make sure to either get a case or build them on stilts with a large fan in front/ behind them
Personally, I bought 3 compaq hubs (I paid at most 35$ + 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.