tommy said:Does anyone have any suggestions for a consumer version of a RAID 5
NAS at least 2TB? I know that it is not really consumer oriented yet
but I've reached a point that I need such space and am willing to
shell out if need be.
Previously Mike Tomlinson said:We recently bought and installed an HP StorageWorks NAS appliance. This
is 1U rackmount, so met our requirement for taking up as little room in
a rack as possible. It has a P4 2.8GHz processor and 512Mb RAM.Only drawback was that it came with "Windows Server 2003 Appliance
Edition", whatever that is, as the OS. This was terminated with extreme
prejudice and Linux installed. Works well.
My experience also. You can do this with cheaper hardware too,
but get a good PSU and good cooling for the drives. Also a good case
makes installing the stuff far more pleasurable.
You could easily build your own with a few SATA drives, a 3ware RAID
controller, a decent case and PSU and a copy of Linux. Pay attention to
cooling the drives properly.
You can use Linux software RAID. Does not give you worse
performance actually (to my surprise). SATA is at the moment
a bit experimental on Linux, and depending on reliability needed
you might want to stick to IDE drives. In that case cable length
is a consideration so make sure you can fit all the drives into
the case close enough to the mainboard. I use cheap Promise
controllers for extra IDE ports, no problems yet.
One word of advice: I got an Adaptec 2810AS controller for my first
attempt at a large RAID. It really is a badly designed product and
significantly slower than software-RAID. It took a whole day to
resync an array (software: 8 hours) and crashed several times until
I removed it. The so called "commandline interface" is really just
a text-mode "graphical" shell and completely unusable for any
automated things. The SMART monitoring advertosed is not actually
implemented, so you cannot check on your drives.
Arno
Arno Wagner <[email protected]> said:You can use Linux software RAID. Does not give you worse
performance actually (to my surprise).
SATA is at the moment
a bit experimental on Linux,
One word of advice: I got an Adaptec 2810AS controller for my first
attempt at a large RAID. It really is a badly designed product and
significantly slower than software-RAID.
Mike said:We recently bought and installed an HP StorageWorks NAS appliance. This
is 1U rackmount, so met our requirement for taking up as little room in
a rack as possible. It has a P4 2.8GHz processor and 512Mb RAM.
Only drawback was that it came with "Windows Server 2003 Appliance
Edition", whatever that is, as the OS. This was terminated with extreme
prejudice and Linux installed. Works well.
You could easily build your own with a few SATA drives, a 3ware RAID
controller, a decent case and PSU and a copy of Linux. Pay attention to
cooling the drives properly.
Previously Mike Tomlinson said:I can believe that, given Linux's efficient handling of threads. You'd
need a fairly quick CPU though (not that they're expensive now.)
Athlon 2200XP+ or so is fine.
The Silicon Image 3112 controller appears to be well supported.
Support is o.k.. Error handling is not quite there for
some types of errors, at least in the Promise driver.
I got a number of freezes recently (hardware problem).
Hot-swap and SMART is not supported yet either.
However I expect that the next few months will fix these
issues, e.g. SMART is already being worked on as far
as I understand.
Noted, thanks. Adaptec seem to have dropped the ball since they moved
away from basic SCSI cards.
My impression also. I will stay with software-RAID for the
future. More control, flexibility, documentation and reliability.
Arno