Best External Storage Solution for SOHO Setups? 59
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)?"
SCSI attached IDE disks (Score:4, Informative)
If anyone has used these particular models, I'd be interested in hearing about your experiences...
Re:SCSI attached IDE disks (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh, to be fair, the default Transtec keyboard sucks.
Re:SCSI attached IDE disks (Score:1)
Re: Fibre target (Score:1)
Re:What is SOHO? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What is SOHO? (Score:2)
Re:What is SOHO? (Score:2)
Re:What is SOHO? (Score:1)
I played the silver ball
From Soho down to Brighton
I must have played them all
Wow rock and roll does teach you something.
Do it yourself... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Do it yourself... (Score:1)
Re:Do it yourself... (Score:1)
I'm not saying you can't but I'd like to know where you got those numbers from...
Re:Do it yourself... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Do it yourself... (Score:1)
Re:Do it yourself... (Score:2)
Production or not, it's still PC hardware running as an NFS/Samba/FTP server. You can use a 300MHz Celeron CPU or quad 2GHz Xeons - it won't perform any differently when the bottleneck is the speed of the hard disk or the network connection. You don't need a high end video card (or really any video card) for a unix server running in console mode, and for $100, you can pickup a decent motherboard if you don't need a millio
Re:Do it yourself... (Score:2)
No hot spare ? You're braver than I am...
Re:Do it yourself... (Score:2)
I'm a media tech consultant. RAID does no good (for video) if its at the end of (even) a gigabit ethernet connection -- you need it on the local bus. The only point of server RAID is for reliability/redundancy, and it sounds as if this guy wants workstation RAID.
Software RAID (Score:4, Interesting)
Is there a reason to rule that out?
Small(ish) *nix box? (Score:2, Insightful)
It just might be able to be tweaked to double as a mail or web server if needed as well... ;)
Pick any two (Score:3, Funny)
Pick any two.
Re:Pick any two (Score:2)
That's not really true any more. IDE RAID solutions tend to be all four of those things. In fact, IDE RAID has finally allowed RAID to live up to its acronym, specifically the "I" for Inexpensive.
On the reliability side, you might have more drive failures than with SCSI, but given that it's RAID, your data isn't at significantly greater risk. And the drives are so cheap, keeping a few extras around is no big deal.
Re:Pick any two (Score:1)
The cheap ones are not the fastest nor are they the biggest nor are they the most realiable. the most reliable ones are not the fastest nor are they the cheapest.
Most users who setup small cheap IDE Raid systems only tackle the basics of the system. In order for it to be reliable you will need 99.999 uptime. For alot of users once the data is partially secure they call it finished. How many of these users factor in Hotswap Power, Hotplug controllers and hotswap drives? Most likely very
Re:Pick any two (Score:2)
No-one said anything about choosing between biggest/fastest/most reliable/cheapest. The words used were "Space/Speed/Reliability/Cheap". IDE RAID offers all of these things.
For most applications, including many very demanding ones, standard 7200rpm IDE drives in a redundant RAID configuration provides excellent speed, reliability, and size, a
Re:Pick any two (Score:1)
Re:Pick any two (Score:1)
Easy: you made a glib statement that happened, in this case, to no longer be true (perhaps you weren't aware of that). When I pointed this out, you contradicted me and repeated your assertion with a bogus justification, to which I responded.
You're right though, that should have been a clue that I wasn't going to be getting through to you with facts...
Re:Pick any two (Score:1)
Re:Pick any two (Score:1)
There was a progression, remember? Your initial comment was general - and I didn't think it applied in this situation, and I pointed that out. You replied to that with more detail, disagreeing, and I responded to that.
Anyway, the bit that I assume you didn't like was what I said about your logic being like that of salespeople selling systems. I apologize for that comment. I believe the comment is true, in the sense that salespeopl
3ware (Score:5, Informative)
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).
Similiar Situation (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Similiar Situation (Score:1)
If you have a motherboard that has on-board RAID already, that's 4 channels, add another card, and you can have 6 channels, enough for a terabyte of RAID5.
Re:Similiar Situation (Score:1)
Promise makes a nice external enclosure (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.promise.com/product/product_list_eng.a
Another possible solution (Score:1)
Wait for more iSCSI (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Good Grief man (Score:1, Insightful)
We have over 40 users at my office and run a Linux+Samba+RAID 1+0 and have no problems. I think you are going into over kill mode.
A bit of a kludge... (Score:1, Informative)
Try these people (Score:1)
Snap (Score:1)
Is this cheap/large enough? (Score:4, Insightful)
$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.
This (Score:3, Informative)
Elegant Linux Raid [pg.gda.pl]
Note if you use IE you'll get this:
Microsoft-Free Friday
In support of freedom of choice in browser software, this web site is Microsoft-Free on Fridays. Please use any browser except MSIE to access this web site today.
Re:This (Score:3, Insightful)
Should freedom of choice in browsers mean that i have a choice in what browser I use? By making it not work in IE, they've basically voilated their own stance.
oh yeah, I'm at school, which uses IE, but at home I use Redhat9 with mozilla. so what i'm saying here is that i'm using ie because i have to... which means i dont' have a choice at
Re:This (Score:2)
Secondly, the person responsible needs to research what "freedom of choice" means.
Re:This (Score:2)
I was going for sarcasm but instead of +1 Funny I get +1 Informative. Go figure. Next time I'll use my patented sarcasm tags.
Re:This (Score:2)
Although given some of the posters here, can you really blame me for taking you seriously ? ;)
Snap Server or Custom-built (Score:1)
Wow (Score:3, Funny)
So you work for NASA?
Small server (Score:2)
Add in a PCI IDE raid card, and four drives. Configure as 0+1 RAID, to get thruput plus reliability.
Through on an old copy of windows, or your OS of choice.
With all new hardware, box is $300, drives ~$400. Good shopping should drop that cost down, or up as your needs demand.
Fibre Channel (Score:3, Interesting)
1) Look on Ebay for Corpsys HDs. Get the 18.3gb/4mb cache seagate fibre channel 10pack for 139.99
2)Buy from them online 10 FCAL/Copper connectors (10 @ 15.95 ea)
3)Buy a FC HBA - Emulex LP6000 are cheap- get the DB9 connector unless you are going to buy a hub
4)Goto radioshack and buy a bunch of db9 pin connectors (I didn't use the solder type as I figured I could just plug them in)- about 1.50$ 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!
Re:Fibre Channel (Score:1)
Re:Fibre Channel (Score:2)
there are a few more little things, like jumpering the drives in the right order, but thats pretty much the gist of it.
Re:Fibre Channel - and a case! (Score:3, Informative)
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
IDE drives fibre channel connection (Score:1)
Supermicro chassis, maxtor diamondmax 9+, 3ware... (Score:2)
SuperMicro [supermicro.com] has some astonishing cases ( one takes, with their 5-drive backplane-type things, S-ATA, 15 drives .. Stock!! )...
a pair of 3ware [3ware.com] S-ATA cards [3ware.com] in a dual-Athlon 'board ( cheapest AthlonMP chips you can get, you'd want 'em for unstoppability, rather than for blitz-performance, eh? ... or go for a pair of the slowest, coolest-running, AthlonXP's and short the correct bridges to MP 'em, though the kernel will run as "License Tainted" then... )...
A batch of Maxtor DiamondMax 9 S-ATA drives Model N [maxtor.com]
When you say external... (Score:2)