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)?"

SCSI attached IDE disks

[bencc99]

I've recently been looking at the Transtec IDE/SCSI [transtec.co.uk] 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...

Re:SCSI attached IDE disks

[laughing_badger]

Toyed with the idea of getting one of these for the office but came to the conclusion that a linux box running hardware RAID from a 3ware controller card was better value. Transtec configured this exactly how I wanted it - I can highly recommend them. The 3ware card is pretty good too.

Oh, to be fair, the default Transtec keyboard sucks.

Re:SCSI attached IDE disks

[darkang31]

Speaking of using alot of IDE disks, is there currently a project to use a Linux machine as a Fiber Channel target? All of the current Fiber Channel RAID adapters are way on the expensive side, and (after googling for it), there's very little information on people using a Linux machine as a cheap Fiber Channel target... The adapters and cables are cheap, and many people have a few = 300mhz boxes around that would be able to function as Fiber to IDE service processors...

Re: Fibre target

[jdray]

I was thinking along the same lines some time ago and posted a question to the SourceForge Storage Foundry about creating a "storage router" that would run under Linux and be able to route storage requests between any two types of interface (SCSI to IDE, FC to SCSI, etc). The response I got was, "That sounds doable," but nothing else. Not knowing the first thing about either kernel-level development or project management on SourceForge, I didn't pursue it. It still strikes me as a good idea, though...

Re:What is SOHO?

[cdrudge]

Small office home office. It's also a burb of NYC, but I think he was meaning the other one.

Re:What is SOHO?

[cdrudge]

I guess your right. Where I come from...a neighborhood that size is considered a town. :)

Re:What is SOHO?

[unitron]

Isn't there also a part of London, England known as Soho?

Re:What is SOHO?

[mink]

Ever since I was a young boy
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...

[hafree]

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.

Re:Do it yourself...

[linkages]

I guess you could do it for $2k if you dropped out the hotswap, redundany power supplies and hardware RAID 5 but this is for SOHO isn't it. Has anyone used the built in motherboard raid controllers on any abit mobos? I understand that they are software. I am curious what kind of performace you can get from these babies.

Re:Do it yourself...

[JesterOne]

I'd like to know where you're shopping at... I just priced out a setup like this with 1.2TB of space and it's going to cost about $4500 (and that's not counting some of the stuff that I have lying around like cables, floppy drive, video card, etc.). The drives alone were almost $1800.

I'm not saying you can't but I'd like to know where you got those numbers from...

Re:Do it yourself...

[hafree]

Let's start by building a barebones system for our server. Motherboard, CPU, RAM, video card and NIC in a decent case. None of this needs to be top of the line just to run as a SAN solution, so we can opt for a slower celeron CPU, low-end video card, etc. Rather than picking specific components, let's estimate this to be around $300-400 with a decent size power supply in the case. Next we'll add a 3Ware Escalade 7500-8 ATA RAID Controller [cdw.com] for $470, and 6 Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 200GB 7200rpm hard drive [cdw.com]

Re:Do it yourself...

[JesterOne]

See there lies the problem... To function as a NAS in a production enviroment, I used top of the line components (but shopped around for the best prices - the 7500-8 I'm using is only $413 - The Maxtor drives are $216 each but I've got all 8 channels filled, etc.). The MB is a Tyan S2462 with dual Althon MP 1600+ and a gig of memory. You're talking about a bunch of drives in a PC for storage, I'm talking about a production server for off-site storage and disaster recovery. Apples and oranges...

Re:Do it yourself...

[hafree]

To function as a NAS in a production enviroment, I used top of the line components

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...

[drsmithy]

[...] and 6 Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 200GB 7200rpm hard drives [cdw.com] at $279 each. This gives us an even terrabyte of ide raid5 storage [...]

No hot spare ? You're braver than I am...

Re:Do it yourself...

[shylock0]

Yeah, the real problem with NAS is that the guy wants to use it for video. Unless it's being archived, that means he needs at least FireWire, if not SCSI/ATA (RAID).

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

[JAZ]

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?

Small(ish) *nix box?

[Zocalo]

What about a standard mini-tower form factor PC running your distro of choice? Get an integrated mobo with onboard NIC, onboard ATA RAID, add a 1394 card if you can't get onboard and you are done. You can mount the disks via NFS, Samba or whatever over the LAN or use the Ethernet-over-Firewire driver to use the 1394.

It just might be able to be tweaked to double as a mail or web server if needed as well... ;)

Pick any two

[satterth]

Space/Speed/Reliability/Cheap

Pick any two.

Re:Pick any two

[alienmole]

Space/Speed/Reliability/Cheap

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

[satterth]

But it is true...

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

[alienmole]

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.

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

[satterth]

Oh my lord, what did i say to deserve this?

Re:Pick any two

[alienmole]

Oh my lord, what did i say to deserve this?

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

[satterth]

But all i made was a general comment. Why did you read so far into it?

Re:Pick any two

[alienmole]

But all i made was a general comment. Why did you read so far into it?

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

[cyb97]

Have you taken a look at 3ware [3ware.com] ?
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 ;-). (NO I do NOT work for them, nor do I resell them, just another happy customer).
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

[Heinr!ch]

I'm in the same boat. I've been running a 400Mhz Redhat 7.3 machine w/a pair of 120GB WD8MB IDE drives configured for RAID 0 using a Promise Fasttrack Controller. But I'm constantly running out of space and would really like to move towards RAID 5. The HSB Series II is ambiguous about RAID support. It appears that it's software driven - and only available for Win2k and OS X? In any event, I was thinking of building another box using a 600Mhz Redhat 7.3 box + the 3Ware 4-channel RAID controller. The t

Re:Similiar Situation

[ottawanker]

Why not just use Linux Software RAID [ibiblio.org]? That way you don't have to worry about drivers, and don't need to spend the extra money on RAID controllers, just add any normal ATA66/100/133 controller. The same sort of thing is available in Win2k server (don't know about other NT versions).

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

[Heinr!ch]

I've considered this approach also, but I like the idea that the RAID volumes appear like any other logical volume to the OS (or at least they're supposed to - Linux is a little too smart). This gives you the ability to dual boot on a RAID volume as well if you so desire for whatever reason.

Promise makes a nice external enclosure

[linkages]

Promise makes a whole line of external enclosures that are both rackmountable and desk side. They are resonably affordable. Anything from $600 and up to ~$4000

http://www.promise.com/product/product_list_eng.as p?familyId=6 [promise.com]

Another possible solution

[gi-tux]

I have a friend that works for a company (Emerging Systems, Inc.) that does NAS. I don't believe that they have 1394, but they definitely do RAID. You might check them out at www.esysinc.com [esysinc.com].

Wait for more iSCSI

[4of12]

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Why in the name of heaven would you need this kind of setup for a Small or Home office???? Do you think a Small office is less than 1000 users????
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...

[Anonymous Coward]

But I think something like this [buy.com] might work. I know it's not firewire (one of your requirements) but if you're looking for redundancy, just buy two and have them mirror each other. They're certainly cheap enough.

Try these people

[wom]

They used to be Legacy Storage Systems [legacystorage.com], been around for a while. Never used their products though.

Snap

[nelsonal]

Quantum's Snap products are pretty nice from the reviews. I think unlike most of the other x86 stuff theirs is based on linux or BSD, if that is important to you. Dell's storage is pretty popular, too. If you're just looking for disks, try the powervault or build it yourself. If you want a rackmount enclosure buy it with as few drives as possible, then fill it with drives you acquire from someone else. Storage like RAM is an expensive upgrade. For just add on storage, with no NAS, you can get almost a

Is this cheap/large enough?

[satterth]

$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

[sheddd]

Is the most elegant solution I've seen:

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

[bryanthompson]

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.

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

[drsmithy]

Firstly, there's nothing at all elegant about that setup.

Secondly, the person responsible needs to research what "freedom of choice" means.

Re:This

[sheddd]

Firstly, there's nothing at all elegant about that setup.

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

[drsmithy]

*blushes*. Looks like you got me :).

Although given some of the posters here, can you really blame me for taking you seriously ? ;)

Snap Server or Custom-built

[questionlp]

One option that you may want to look at on the NAS side of things is to look at the Snap Server offering. They aren't exactly inexpensive but supports Windows, UNIX (via NFS or if your Linux/BSD system supports mounting CIFS/SMBFS shares) and Mac. The units come in either small desktop units or rackmount units. The desktop ones usually have one or two drives, thus aren't capable of RAID5, but the 1U units have four drives and support RAID 0/1/5. Most of the older 4000-line and lower units are capable of 10/

Wow

[arvindn]

Storage Solution for the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory?

So you work for NASA?

;^)

Small server

[jhines]

Get a low end system these days, with a big case.

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

[purduephotog]

This is my suggestion for about ~600$ (at the most).

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

[nelsonal]

Thanks I have seen fiber channel stuff cheap before, but never had any idea what else was required to make it all work. I knew I needed an HBA, but that was it.

Re:Fibre Channel

[purduephotog]

Well so far it's been about a 600$ experiment. with IDE coming down in price its no longer such a good one, but for sharing between devices it's quite excellent. Much much faster than gigabit ethernet (tho I haven't worked on it much right now due to some roof leaks ;P)

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!

[purduephotog]

I forgot to mention how hot the drives get- make sure to either get a case or build them on stilts with a large fan in front/ behind them

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

[musicgreg]

How about using IDE hard drives with a fibre channel connection? apple.com [apple.com] has a 720 gig array for abotu $6k, and you could easily add many more drives as there are only 4 that come with it, which allows space for the addition of 10 more IDE drives.

Supermicro chassis, maxtor diamondmax 9+, 3ware...

[DancingSword]

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...

[unitron]

When you say external do you mean in another box sitting right next to the first box or somewhere that will still be in good and working shape after a fire has destroyed everything in the room where the frst box is now a slag heap, or a tornado has moved that room and the building of which it was part down the street a few hundred yards?