On Jan 12, 2004, at 3:33 PM, Ricky Beam wrote:
On Mon, 12 Jan 2004, Alfio Puglisi wrote:
Someone mentioned $6K for Apple raid storage, but
that price is not so
high: here at work we have some kind of raid NAS (half a terabyte I
think)
that went for about $4K. So yeah, NAS can be expensive, a simple
internal
And it's certainly IDE based. You might have it connected to a SCSI
card
but the drives are the same unreliable IDE drives everyone throws away
every year. SCSI hardware RAID is, strictly speaking, unnecessary.
The two opterons in the box are far more powerful than any RAID card.
Sure, hardware is nice, but not really necessary with good drives
from the get-go (i.e. they're all SCSI and we don't need some magic
from a hardware RAID card to make IDE performance acceptable.)
I currently have a $250 eurologic fibre channel shelf (FC7 or FC9) with
dual power supplies and 7 146G seagate (300$ each) heating my
apartment :-)
The shelf is easy to find. Wiki would want new drives vs. the OEM
pulls
I'm using which doubles the cost of the drives. (they aren't easy to
find
used anyway.) That's just under 1TB. Each drive can stream ~60MB/s.
Yes,
EACH. (all the way to bus saturation: 2Gb/s)
--Ricky
PS: I have 6 more of those shelves loaded with 18G drives... old NetApp
filer disks.
I'm not saying you can't build a similar system for cheaper (possibly a
couple thousand dollars cheaper). But, do we want to spend a lot of
time building and debugging hardware? Do we want to be responsible for
paying for any unforeseen hardware problems, or do we want to have some
kind of support contract with someone? Imagine how much this Penguin
Computing system would be costing us in time and money if we had to pay
for all the replacement parts (especially when we are unsure where the
problem lies.) Building your own hardware is great when you're
desperate to save a few bucks, but if we've got the money, we might as
well spend it on making things as reliable as possible. I think we
would be doing a disservice to all those who made donations otherwise.
--
Nick Reinking -- eschewing obfuscation since 1981 -- Minneapolis, MN