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Fibre Channel Storage?
Dave Robertson asks: "Fibre channel storage has been filtering down from the rarefied heights of big business and is now beginning to be a sensible option for smaller enterprises and institutions. An illuminating example of this is Apple's Xserve Raid which has set a new low price point for this type of storage - with some compromises, naturally. Fibre channel switches and host bus adapters have also fallen in price but generally, storage arrays such as those from Infortrend or EMC are still aimed at the medium to high-end enterprise market and are priced accordingly. These units are expensive in part because they aim to have very high availability and are therefore well-engineered and provide dual redundant everything." This brings us to the question: Is it possible to build your own Fibre Channnel storage array?
"In some alternative markets - education for example - I see a need for server storage systems with very high transaction rates (I/Os per second) and the flexibility of FC, but without the need for very high availability and without the ability to pay enterprise prices. The Xserve Raid comes close to meeting the need but its major design compromise is to use ATA drives, thus losing the high I/O rate of FC drives.
I'm considering building my own experimental fibre channel storage unit. Disks are available from Seagate, and SCA to FC T-card adapters are also available. A hardware raid controller would also be nice.
Before launching into the project, I'd like to cast the net out and solicit the experiences and advice of anyone who has tried this. It should be relatively easy to create a single-drive unit similar to the Apcon TestDrive or a JBOD, but a RAID array may be more difficult. The design goals are to achieve a high I/O rate (we'll use postmark to measure this) in a fibre channel environment at the lowest possible price. We're prepared to compromise on availability and 'enterprise management features'. We'd like to use off the shelf components as far as possible.
Seagate has a good fibre channel primer, if you need to refresh your memory."
I'm considering building my own experimental fibre channel storage unit. Disks are available from Seagate, and SCA to FC T-card adapters are also available. A hardware raid controller would also be nice.
Before launching into the project, I'd like to cast the net out and solicit the experiences and advice of anyone who has tried this. It should be relatively easy to create a single-drive unit similar to the Apcon TestDrive or a JBOD, but a RAID array may be more difficult. The design goals are to achieve a high I/O rate (we'll use postmark to measure this) in a fibre channel environment at the lowest possible price. We're prepared to compromise on availability and 'enterprise management features'. We'd like to use off the shelf components as far as possible.
Seagate has a good fibre channel primer, if you need to refresh your memory."
Sun's A5200s are cheap on eBay, and you can pick up something like a 420r or a 250 to drive the thing. Put a qfe card in with the free sun trunking now for Solaris 10 and it'll serve up your files super speedy, all for very reasonable.
My friend, recursive green, has three A5200s in his basement right now, one stores his *ahem* photo collection and is web accessible.
I think new(er) fibre things are getting cheaper, but what was often high-end data-center-only big-$$ of a few years ago hits the price point of "at home" now.
Wheeeee
It actually looks like SATA has a higher potential speed than FC, though it's not designed to act as a bus like FC is. I suspect a machine with a multiple SATA RAID controller will beat the equivalent FC solution, though perhaps with less failover capability.
Would the new eSATA external SATA interface be fast enough for your purposes?
You can get a sata-II to FC adapter from areca, these are pretty expensive, but the nice thing is that you don't need a motherboard in your case. Combine it with a chenbro 3U 16 bay case and you have a relatively affordable setup.
h tm
http://www.areca.com.tw/products/html/fibre-sata.
Aside from Fiber Channel, you could roll your own with iSCSI or ATAoE (ATA over Ethernet). This way you could take advantage of existing ethernet infrastructure and expertise, and partition off a storage VLAN for all of your DASD.
The major thing about both SCSI and FC was that both of those designs imply greater redundance. Serial ATA provides one major thing which Parallel ATA could almost do. High THROUGHPUT... but no redundancy and higher CPU usage than SCSI chipsets.
:)
Transactions make significant use of CPU resources in ATA based systems. The only cards I am aware of that move ATA transactions to hardware come from Advansys and Adaptec, both use SCSI chipsets but ATA translators. Available for about 190.00 each but hard to find.
On a PII 450 the chipset usage on a softraid was almost 40% when at full throttle with 3 P/ATA drives. Same system went down a tidbit using a PCI card (not sure why actually, presumably some operations are offboarded by the PCI card thus reducing the overhead, but don't quote me on it).
The main problem with all of this is cost vs redundancy vs speed... which brings us to the old issue we found with Cars. the FAST, GOOD, CHEAP pyramid.
FAST
/ \
GOOD-----CHEAP
CHEAP + FAST != GOOD
GOOD + CHEAP != FAST
FAST + GOOD != CHEAP
My suggestion since my own buying experience with FC is limited (read as NONEXISTANT) I can only tell you what I've learned on SCSI vs PATA/SATA rigs.
SATA systems that do not use an Adaptec chipset are usually mere translators that make use of CPU resources to monitor drive activities. 3Ware cards seem to transcend this limitation rather well and they provide a fine hardware RAID setup for ATA drives.
PATA systems that do not use an Adaptec chipset are likewise mere translators.
SCSI interfaces make use of a hardware chipset that monitors and controls each drive... thus relieving the CPU of being abused by drive intensive operations (think of a high provile FTP or CVS/Subversion server and you get the idea of what would happen to the CPU if it was forced to perform the duties of server processor AND software RAID monitor).
Onto bandwidth. Serial ATA setups suffer from a similar issue I've found with almost all setups. Without separate controllers, SATA setups and PATA setups split up the total bandwidth to the maximum number of active drives. More recent controllers available via SATA may have fixed this issue, but in general, I've found that my systems slowed down in data transfer rate when using drives or arrays found on the same card. SCSI seems to bypass this completely by providing each drive with a dedicated pipeline, but I am not sure what the set ammount is, there is an issue however, as some of the older chipsets DO have some issues when handling a full set of 15 drives. The primer on the article link at Seagate is on the money in their LVD vs FC link/FAQ. You will most likely require a backplane and full setup, and it probably won't be cheap. The big difference will be that FC setups are usually bulletproof, and can support MASSIVE amounts of drives (128 or 125 I think...), with the only thing being faster being a VERY high end Solid State drive or array. Those also have a very small amount of latency, but as far as speed, setup a good ram drive on a dedicated memory bank with backup battery and EMP shielding... okay, that's way expensive
~D
PS - I understand that I've not answered your question but I should've simplified this for everyone else out there.
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
Speaking as the owner of two XServe RAID devices (5TB and 7TB models) as well as several other Fibre Channel devices I can say that the Apple Fibre Channel is by no means slow. Each SATA drive has pretty much equal performance to the SCSI drives we use in our Dell head node. Combined together there are times where we can pull several hundred megs a second off the XRAID's. Plus our XRAID has been fairly immune to failures thusfar. I have yanked drives out of it and it just keeps right on going.
Another little hint, if you are really worried about speed you can just install large high RPM sata drives yourself. Its not that hard to do at all.
Check out Alien Raid for more information.
Infortrend is crap! Stay far, far away from anything produced by them. I'd also warn against purchasing from one of their US distributors - Zzyzx - but that's not an issue since the company just went out of business.
I think this site may have been on slashdot a few years back.
j .edu/~feuss2/fibre/fibre.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20010406133220/www.tcn
So, the Xraid has Apple's name attached and it's cheaper than an EMC Clariion. Great. Come on, people! Apple is not in any way, shape, or form making their own fibre-channel RAID gear. To think that is just downright naive and fanboyish. Apple has another OEM make their stuff to their spec. It's just that simple.
Apple has not brought anything to a new price point, either. That's a ridiculous notion!
Apple brings nothing to any price-point worth mentioning. The iPod line is grossly overpriced for what you get, their desktops and notebooks are insanely expensive, and their support is obscenely priced.
Now, to get to something meaningful...
You can find much better FC and iSCSI units for far less if you look around a little. I know for a fact that Promise Tech makes some extremely powerful and very affordable FC and iSCSI chassis. http://www.promise.com/
And before anybody (fanboys) start up with the "Apple is a tier one vendor and Promise is not!" -- I urge you to do your homework on storage. You will find that what Promise is peddling is not only cheaper but far more flexible (check out the VTrak manuals).
You say you want inexpensive. Yet you want fibre channel. I think you're looking in the wrong direction. FC is cute to experiment with, but not really feasible for your purposes.
In your question, you said you don't want a whole lot of redundancy or high availability. You can do nearly the same with an inexpensive computer with a large raid, gigabit ethernet, and NFS or Samba.
If there's money riding on this (i.e. you will lose big money each second the connection is down), then you need FC and service contracts (and if it's that important, a data center, etc.). Otherwise, FC's overkill.
Because they get FAR more expensive as you go up. Okay, so here's the next setups.
10k rpm (not 15000 mind you) Seagate and Maxtor. Cheapest entries on pricewatch both 495 plus 5 or so shipping UPS ground.
SCSI U320 (nice) and of course they're 300 gigs. GREAT!
Okay now here's the kicker. ALL the other suppliers provide them at 640.00 USD or more. You save some, but the downside I wager is that they won't carry enough to build a large RAID 5 setup. Also, the smaller drives are faster in a large array because you spread the seek requests accross many smaller drives. Same goes with the independent write requests. I don't recall being able to find a SATA raid solution with THAT many sockets that isn't a standalone device / tower.
Again, depending how you do it, you'll end up paying a lot for power and cooling (air conditioning so another power cost).
~D
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
We personally use a StorCase infostation at work (http://www.storcase.com/infostation/ifs_ovrvw.asp ). Now, we have the scsi version, so I can't speak to the Fiber version, but a fully loaded Storcase is cheaper then an XServe, and more dense. Alas, it would not come with the instant solution tech support that an XServe would.
This
First of all, a good 400GB SATA drive runs around $300. Note that it isn't even SATA2 which one would probably want for a high performance RAID (NCQ et al).
Second, 36GB is hardly the top end for SCSI drives. For a little more than $300 you can get 147GB SCSI drives. Also keep in mind that more drives means more striped performance. So more drives isn't necessarily a bad thing.
Granted, it is still more expensive for teh SCSI setup. I just think you should make a fair comparison.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
..actually, the hard drive iPods are quite reasonable.
Their competitors are often quite a bit more expensive in the same storage range.
Often the competitors products do more than the iPod, but the iPod does what people want, they don't care about the extra stuff if they have to pay for it.
First, you haven't articulated your needs properly. "High I/O rates" means two separate things, both of which must be considered and engineered for:
.5TB of disk. (I am writing a book on configuring the thing in March, so you will have a full configuration guide (with pretty pictures and step-by-step instructions) by the beginning of April.)
1) High numbers of transactions per second. Your focus here is going to be on units that can hold a LOT of drives (not necessarily of high capacity). You want as many sets of drive heads as possible going here. In addition, SATA drives are not made to handle high duty-cycles of high transaction rates. The voice coils have insufficient heat dispersion. (They are just plain cheaper drives.) High transaction rates require a pretty expensive controller, and you won't be able to avoid redundancy, but that isn't a problem, since you are going to need both controllers to support the IOPS. (I/O's per second.)
2) High raw bandwidth. If you need raw bandwidth and your data load is non-cacheable, then really software RAID + a JBOD may be able to get the job done here, if you have a multi-CPU box so one CPU can do the RAID-ing. Again, two controllers are usually going to provide you with the best bandwidth. SATA striped across a sufficient number of drives can give you fairly decent I/O, but not as good as FC.
There are "low end" arrays available that will offer reduced redundancy. The IBM DS 400 is an example. This box is OEM'd from Adaptec, and pretty much uses a ServRAID adapter as the "guts" of the box. This unit uses FC on the host side, and SCSI drives on the disk side. It is available in single and dual controller models. (Obligatory note: I do work for IBM, but I am not a sales drone.) This setup has the distinct advantage of being fully supportable by your vendor. A homegrown box will not have that important advantage.
Don't be scared away by the list price, as nobody ever pays it. Contact your local IBM branch office (or IBM business partner/reseller), and they can hook you up.
This unit is also available as part of an "IBM SAN Starter Kit" which gives you a couple of bargain-barrel FC switches, four HBA's, and one of these arrays w/
SirWired
Searching a bit on the net gives you a couple of possibility. An example from an all FC array available in europe:t ec_6600.html
http://www.transtec.de/D/E/products/Storage/trans
Meaning they bought the whole company not just a license to the backup system.
Symantec is a financially powerful corp. They DID buy Veritas... unless this is a different Veritas corp.
~D
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
The answer has a lot to do with the previously mentioned I/O goals that you have. Let me try to answer this in a taxonomy. This rambles for a bit but bear with me.
Case One
Let's say this array is to be used for a single application that needs lots of pull and is populated initially from other sources, with a low delta of updates. In other words, largely reads vs writes. Cacheing may help; and if so, then you can tune the app (and the OS) to get fairly good performance from SATA RAID or through FC JBODs when in a Raid 0 or 5 configuration. (there is no Raid 0; its just a striped array without redundancy/availability and is therefore a misnomer)
Case Two
Maybe you need a more generalized SAN, as it will be hit by a number of machines with a number of apps. You'll need better controller logic. You'll likely initially need a SAN that has a single SCSI LUN appearance, where you can log on to the SAN via IP for external control of the can that stores the drives (and controls the RAID level, and so on). This is how the early Xserve RAID worked, and how many small SAN subsystems work. Here, the I/O blocks/problems come at different places-- mostly at the LUN when the drive is being hit by multiple requests from different apps connected via (hopefully) an FC non-blocking switch (Think an old eBay-purchased Brocade Silkworm, etc). SCSI won't necessarily help you much.... and a SATA array has the same LUN point block. Contention is the problem here; delivery is a secondary issue unless you're looking for superlative performance with calculated streams.
Case Three
Maybe you're streaming or rendering and need concurrent paths in an isochronous arrangement with low latency but fairly low data rates-- just many of them concurrently. Studio editing; rendering farms, etc. Here's where a fat server connecting a resilient array works well. Consider a server that uses a fast, cached, PCI-X controller connected to a fat line of JBOD arrays. The server costs a few bucks, as does the controller, but the JBOD cans and drives are fairly inexpensive and can be high-duration/streaming devices. You need to have a server whose PCI-X array isn't somehow trampled by a slow, non-PCI-X GBE controller as non-PCI-X devices will slow down the bus. You also get the flexibility of hanging additional items off the FC buses, then adding FC switches as the need arises. At some point, the server becomes more useless in cache and becomes its own botleneck-- but you'll have proven your point and will have what now amounts to a real SAN with real switches and real devices.
The SATA vs SCSI argument is somewhat moot. Unless you cache the SATA drives, they're simply 2/3rd the possible speed (at best) of a high-RPM SCSI/FC drive. It's that simple. uSATA will come one day, then uSATA/hi-RPM..... and they'll catch up until the 30Krpm SCSI drives appear.... with higher density platters....and the cost will shrink some more.
I've been doing this since a 5MB hard drive was a big deal. SCSI drives will continue to lead SATA for a while, but SATA will eventually catch up. In the mean time, watch the specs and don't be afraid of configuring your own JBOD. And if you want someone to yell at, the Xserve RAID is as good as the next one.... except that it has the Apple Sex Appeal that seems a bit much on a device that I want to hide in a rack in another building.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Fiber channel just seems to have to high a cost of entry these days (or maybe it always have :-). It's not bad today with SATA being used on the storage arrays, but it is hard to compete with the other emerging standards. I've been using AoE for a little while now and have been impressed with the bang for the buck.
A GigE switch is cheap, and a GigE port is easy to add, or you can use the existing one on a system. AoE sits down below the IP stack so there is little overhead for comm, and it looks like a SATA drive in most ways. The primary vendor's appliance (www.coraid.com) will take a rack full of SATA and make it look like one drive via various RAID configs.
Yeah FC is faster, but how many drives are going to be talking at once? Are you really going to fill the GigE and need a FC to alleviate the bottleneck? If you are then FC is probably not the right solution for you anyway.
Your mileage may vary, but I expect anyone will get comparable results for the price, and many will get excellent results overall.
I can toss in a bit of advice as I've been working with fibre channel from the low to the high end for several years now. Currently I'm managing a lab with equipment from EMC, HDS, McData, Brocade, Qlogic, Emulex, 3par, HP, Sun, etc. from the top to bottom of the food chain. I'm personnaly running a small FCAL setup at home for my fileserver.
0. Get everything off of ebay.
1. Stick with 1GB speed equipment. It's older, but an order of magnitude less expensive.
2. Avoid optical connections if you can -- for a small configuration, copper is just fine and often a lot less expensive. Fibre is good for long distance hauls and >1gb speed.
3. Pick up a server board with 64bit pci slots, preferably at 66mhz.
4. Buy a couple of qlogic 2200/66's. These are solid cards, and are trivial to flash to sun's native leadville fcode if you desire to use a sparc system and the native fibre tools. They also work well on linux/x86 and linux/sparc64. These should run about $25 each.
5. Don't buy a raid enclosure. Get a fibre jbod. You can always reconstruct a software raid set if your host explodes if you write down the information. If you blow a raid controller, you're screwed. Besides, you won't want to pay for a good hardware raid solution, and I have yet to see a card-based raid; they're always integrated into the array. I recommend a Clariion DAE/R. Make sure you get one with the sleds. These have db-9 copper connections and empty should run about $200. Buy 2 or 4 of these, depending on how many hbas you have. They'll often come with some old barracuda 9's. Trash those; they're pretty worthless.
6. Fill the enclosures with seagate fc disks. If you're not after maximum size, the 9gb and 18gb cheetahs are cheap, usually like $10 a pop on ebay and are often offered in large lots. They are so inexpensive it's hard to pass them up. Try to get ST3xxxFC series, but do NOT buy ST3xxxFCV. The V indicates a larger cache, but also a different block format for some EMC controllers. They are a bitch to get normal disk firmware on.
7. Run a link from each enclosure to each hba. Say you have 2 enclosures with 10 disks each. Simple enough; and 1gb second up and down on each link.
8. Use linux software raid to make a bigass stripe across all the disks in one enclosure, repeat on the second enclosure, and make a raid10 out of the two. Tuning the stripe size will depend on the application; 32k is a good starting point.
With that setup, you should pretty much max out the bandwidth of a single 1gb link on each enclosure, and enjoy both performance and reduncancy with the software raid, and not have to worry about any raid controllers crapping out on you.
You should be able to get two enclosures, 20 disks, a couple of copper interconnects and some older hbas for about $750 to $1,000 depending on ebay and shipping costs.
This should net you some pretty damn reasonable disk performance for random access type io. This is NOT the right approach if you're lookign for large amounts of storage. You'll get the raid10 redundancy in my example, but if you want real redundancy (and i mean performance-wise, not just availability -- you can drive a fucking truck over a symmetrix, then saw it in half, and you probably won't notice a blip in the PERFORMANCE of the array--something fidelity and whatnot tends to like) you have to pay big money for it. The huge arrays are more about not ever quivvering in their performance no matter what fails.
Hope this was of some use.
man tunefs | grep fish
Depending on your companies needs, could an iSCSI solution be more viable. There are some very good units out there with loads of various different RAID setups. There are some trade-offs vs. Fibre Channel, such as speed vs. cost etc. I've seen quite a bit of data being handled to/from iSCSI arrays quite nicely. However, the companies I worked for had no true need for the blindingly fast speed, and extremely high cost of FC arrays.
YOU'RE WINNER !
Another lame blog
take a look at what HP/Compaq has to offer. We have a few arrays from them, both SATA and SCSI. Not all Fiber channel though.
My suggestion to the OP is that if he wants to achieve a high I/O rate at the lowest possible price, then the solution if of course to use a Google-like solution: use commodity hardware.
For example buy a lot of ATA/SATA harddisks (in order to spread the load over them), use them inside ATA-over-Ethernet enclosures (www.coraid.com, Linux driver available in any 2.6 vanilla kernel), and connect them with multiple Gigabit Ethernet links to the storage server. And the best part in all of this: ATA/SATA is so cheap, that you will be able to buy 3 or 4 times more disks than a Fiber Channel solution, allowing you to get more storage space, and a substancially better "I/O rate per dollar" ratio.
Of course ATA/SATA disks are less reliable than FC disks, but this shouldn't matter, because even with expensive high-end solutions, you have to plan for disk failures. With a Fiber Channel solution, you might have to replace a disk every 12 months in your RAID arrays. With an ATA/SATA solution, it might happen every 2 months. But in both cases you don't care: the RAID layer will protect you.
but its major design compromise is to use ATA drives, thus losing the high I/O rate of FC drives
I'd recommend more SATA drives for the same price over fewer, more expensive FC drives. The differences in RAID controllers and number of drives has much more impact in array performance than interface technology. Since FC controllers and drives are more expensive, it's a disadvantage when you are tring to get high speed on a budget.
Fibre channel storage has been filtering down from the rarefied heights of big business and is now beginning to be a sensible option for smaller enterprises and institutions.
Storage systems designed with Fibre Channel have almost no advantages over SATA based ones and cost much more. How is that sensible?
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
The coolest thing would be to turn a Linux box into a Hardware RAID controller. Most of the arrays out there do not run specialized firmware inside for the OS. They run Linux, VxWorks, Windows NT (*cough* EMC Clariion *cough*), of course, heavily customized versions of these OS's, with some having specialized ASICs inside (i.e. Engenio). The thing is, they change their HBAs into Targets, so that the Initiators (your client PC) can use their disks.
I want to figure out how to do this with a Linux box. How could you stuff 4 HBAs in a box and present two of them to the backend disks, and two to the front-end switches/hosts. With this method, you don't have to worry about Software RAID speed, because you're not doing your CPU processing on this server. You're using it just for RAID calculations, which I'm sure a late-model AMD would be great at.
Anyone have any ideas?
I administer a decently sized storage subsystem connected to about 10 servers (half database servers, 1/4 large storage space but low speed requirement, 1/4 backup/tape/etc server).
For a single server, a FC system seems like overkill to me. Buy a direct attached SCSI enclosure and be done with it.
For 10 or more servers, sharing disk space, a SAN (FC IMHO, although iSCSI is acceptible if your servers all share the same security requirements - I.E. are all on the same port of your firewall) is the way to go.
Here's what I see the benefits of a FC SAN as (if you don't need these benefits, you'll waste your money on the SAN if you buy it):
1) High availability
2) Good fault monitoring capability (me and my vendor both get paged if anything goes down, even as simple as a disk reporting errors)
3) Good reporting capability. I can tell you how many transactions a second I process on which spindles, find sources of contention, know my peak disk activity times, etc.
4) Typically good support by the vendor (when one of the two redundant storage processors simply *rebooted* unexepectedly, rather than my vendor saying, "Ah, that's a fluke, we're not going to do anything about it unless it comes back in again", they had a new storage processor to me within one hour)
5) Can be connected to a large number of servers
6) Good ones have good security systems (so I can allow servers 1 & 2 to access virtual disk 1, server 3 to access virtual disk 2, with no server seeing other servers' disks)
7) Ease of adding disks. I can easily add 10 times the current capacity to the array with no downtime.
8) LAN-free backups. You can block-copy data between the SAN and tape unit without ever touching the network.
9) Multi-site support. You can run fiber channel a very long way, between buildings, sites, etc.
10) Ability to snapshot and copy data. I can copy data from one storage system to antoher connected over the same FC fabric with a few mouse clicks. I can instantly take a snapshot of the data (for instance, prior to installing a Windows service pack or when forensic analysis is required) without the hosts even knowing I did it.
Note that "large amounts of space" and "speed" aren't in the 10 things I thought of above. Really, that's secondary for most of my apps, even large databases, as in real use I'm not running into speed issues (nor would I on direct attached disks, I suspect). It's about a whole lot more than speed and space.
I have done this using a Venus-brand 4-drive enclosure, some surplus Seagate FC drives from eBay, a custom-made backplane, a Mylex eXtremeRAID 3000 controller, and a 30m HSSDC DB9 controller from eBay.
I located the array in the basement, and the computer was in my office. I had wonderful performance and no disk noise, which was quite nice...
If you want photos, take a look here.
Also, while I sold off the rest of the kit, I've got the HSSDC DB9 cables left over. While they tend to go for quite a bit new (they are custom AMP cables) I'd be apt to sell them for cheap if another Slashdotter wants to do the same thing.
I've been considering the storage thing for a while now. My current configuration is a Broadcom RAIDcore 6x250GB RAID 5 in a dual Opteron system with PCI-X 64/133mhz slots. Given that it's a workstation Tyan board, it cost me a mint but I have oodles of bandwidth to play with. I've got a few other arrays in that machine on other controllers. The board also has U320 and was all set to buy some 15KRPM drives from eBay till I saw the benchmarks of WD's new Raptor 150 which seems to kill all but the top end 15KRPM drives - and even in some tests, the Raptor wins out (all current 15K models are around 18 months behind).
Now, ny disks are fast but my network is not. My primary use of the network is for data transfer and while ttcp can top out PCI-based NICs at 65MByte/sec, I find it hard to see even half that when accessing files remotely over the network. I'm after a solution to mount these disks remotely and improve upon performance of windows filesharing.
What would be even better, if I could have multiple mounts of the same filesystem. I run Windows and Mac OSX - in an ideal world, I'd like to be able to work off the disks on my PowerBook G4 as I know my GigE card on taht thing will beat FW400 and some FW800 systems. You know, if I could get 50-55MB/sec with disk reads across a network, I;d be happy.
I suppose I can lash out on a few FC cards, an FC switch and an FC enclosure that supports SATA drives. I have boxes of multimode fibre - which is handy, so I can put the disks in another room to save on heat production. Doesn't solve the powerbook issue but my other laptop has a PCI docking station which could take an FC card easily.
If you are just having 'fun' with this - great. Otherwise, you can either get by with what can be done easy with SATA/SCSI and a cheep box, or you are into the low end raid section with things like Apple's box. Need over 180TB going over 1.5/3GB per second on a single system? Try something from here http://www.datadirectnet.com/.