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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?
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Pick any two.
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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).
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.
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$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.