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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...
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
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).
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
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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."
$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
=$1506 for 1.0TB (750GB Raid 5, hotswap)
You can throw all this into your system if you have 3 5-1/4 bays and a PCI slot free. Or invest in an extra computer and a couple gigabit network cards to make it external.
If you need more space than than then get a 7500-8 or 7500-12 and add more drives.
Being called a dork on Slashdot must be like being called the retard in special ed.
Elegant Linux Raid
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So you work for NASA?
This is my suggestion for about ~600$ (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!
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.