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3 Terabytes, 80 Watts
legoburner writes "The Enquirer is reporting that Capricorn have released a mini-itx based 1U-sized storage computer featuring four 750-GB hard drives and a 1-Ghz controller system with a typical power usage of an astounding 80 W per machine. A full 40U rack only uses 3.2 kW, which is less than 30 kW for an entire Petabyte!"
At last, a chance for a rejected ask slashdot of mine... What is the structure of your file storage area / file server? How do you filter and back things up for your home file server?
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And they would need all that storage to record their utility bills.
Where do you live that 80 watts is a big drain on financial resources?
My CPU consumes 39 watts and I consider that loverly, compared to the old CPU which sucked 70+ watts.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
3200 Watts for 120 Terra bytes - that's like two hand-held hair dryers!
Yea, but most people dont run two hair-dryers 24/7
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
While this used to be true, modern drives are the same between IDE/SATA/SCSI except for the control board the drive is strapped to. The reason SCSI is still preferred over IDE/SATA in most cases is from this old belief, most devices for enterprise level storage are still built mainly around it, SCSI still offers more devices per controller (14 per cable, rather than 2 of IDE/SATA), and SCSI is alot more hot-swap friendly. The company I work with has several storage solutions for different needs, the central and main storage is a large Fiberchannel system (3Par InServ), but our backup systems are SATA based (Nexsan SATABeast). All of them use some variant of RAID5, the 3par going so far as allowing raided volume provisioning across the array. As for enterprise level IDE/SATA, the SATABeast, and SATABoy are definately worth at least a peek.
More throughput, maybe, if setup in a RAID that allows that. Reliability, maybe as in the array as a whole, but more spindles=more parts to fail, and with more spindles, more drives WILL fail. The up side is that when a drive fails, it doesnt take as large a chunk of the redundancy with it. With the 3Par, (iirc) a whole shelf of drives (40drives) can fail or be taken offline without losing operation of the array if setup correctly, where in a 4drive RAID5 setup (3 active, 1 hot spare), one drive failure requires rebuilding the failed drive on the hot spare. Losing another requires immediate replacement of hardware. For home or small office, that might be acceptable. But for large enterprise solutions, its not. You simply cannot afford to be running around hoping drives wont fail (they will), with a rack full of these 4drive units. If 2 drives go bad in the same unit at the same time, you just lost data.
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Or 28,000 kWh per year, i.e. $2800 at $0.10 per kWh (not sure what the going rate is nowadays).
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They're using ITX motherboards to keep price/power down. If they used notebook HDs instead of the 3.5" 750GB ones, they'd get about 10% the storage density per host, 50% the price performance per GB, but much better power efficiency per GB. Is there a way to stuff 40 80GB notebook drives into an ITX host, for even better power efficiency at only double the price?
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Just out of curiosity, has anyone out there in Slashdotland had good luck with enterprise IDE solutions? Who knows. Perhaps some success stories might change my pro-SCSI/fibre view.
Yeah, kinda. We've got a tray of PATA in our EMC Clariion. Don't ask it to perform with multi-threaded I/O, and it's certainly slower than the FC stuff, but it works okay for test and backups. Can't say we've seen a higher failure rate on the disks than we have with the FC trays. I hear that the SATA stuff is much better about handling multi-threaded I/O.
What if it is just turtles all the way down?
They don't use RAID at all. They use RAIC (which is an acronym I just made up for a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Computers). Each individual node is a file server. Each file is distributed over a number of file servers. When a machine fails, they just swap in a new machine. It then grabs a load of files that aren't mirrored as much as they should be, and begins serving them.
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They are very low power, reasonably easy to work on and not hot-swap. They are not going to win any speed contests, but they store data cheaply and make it accessible at reasonable rates.
The VIA based systems are PATA, so they will not be RAID5 friendly because RAID5 on master/slave is simply stupid.
They are reasonable fast at delivering the data. Having only a 100Mb connection means that it takes a really really long time to fill it. At the Internet Archive we use the nodes in JBOD and do the redundancy at the application layer.
If I were doing it at home I would probably try out ATA over Ethernet and make all of these hosts/drives targets. Mirroring is always another option.