On Thu, 21 Aug 2009, Luke S Crawford wrote: > > I'm looking at the EtherDrive storage appliances. Can anyone comment on > the performance and reliability? It looks like they don't have much by way > of cache, which sounds like it might be a problem, especially with SATA disks. > > I'd likely be going with the 24-bay system.
I've been working with a stack of (8) 15 drive units. Older technology, the SR1520. When we upgraded them to TB drives, a number of problems started coming up. They run Plan 9 and only have 1GB of RAM, so there is somewhat limited caching. In addition, they do software RAID, which on the older machines (2.4 GHz Pentium 4) and the 8 port non-RAID controllers, is slow. Much faster than the Gb ethernet connection, but really slow when the box decided it needs to resync the array. Like, 18 hours minimum. In addition, after many requests, they have finally released a beta of RAID-6 support. In addition, within the last year, we have had two of them become extremely flaky, causing all sorts of problems. After plugging in a console and running memtest86 on them it was discovered that there was failing RAM. All in all, I have not been happy with them since we upgraded to larger disks. There are just too many bottlenecks. If it was up to me, I would probably build a white box system with lots of memory and fast network interfaces running OpenFiler. Either 4x Gb ethernet that are bonded, 10Gb eithernet (cards are available starting at about $600) or possibly Infiniband (if I already had an Infiniband setup). -- Matt It's not what I know that counts. It's what I can remember in time to use. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
