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