As far as commercial off the shelf SAN devices go, the Apple SANs are by
far some of the cheapest.
They were not quite cheap enough for us, so we built our own storage
servers.
3U supermicro server chassis
15 hot swap sata drives (750GB, of course)
Cheap HighPoint raid card (not using the raid on it)
Dual Opteron (low end)
4GB ECC registered memory
Xen virtual machines
Debian Linux installed on a RAID1 of 4GB CF cards in CF to IDE
converters. Storage is software Raid6 with a hot spare.
Eored:~# cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [raid1] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4]
md1 : active raid6 sda1[0] sdo1[14](S) sdn1[13] sdm1[12] sdl1[11]
sdk1[10] sdj1[9] sdi1[8] sdh1[7] sdg1[6] sdf1[5] sde1[4] sdd1[3] sdc1[2]
sdb1[1]
8790862848 blocks level 6, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [14/14]
[UUUUUUUUUUUUUU]
md0 : active raid1 hdc1[0] hda1[1]
3995584 blocks [2/2] [UU]
unused devices: <none>
Eored:~# fdisk -l /dev/sda
Disk /dev/sda: 750.1 GB, 750156374016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 91201 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 91201 732572001 fd Linux raid
autodetect
Disk /dev/hda: 4098 MB, 4098834432 bytes
128 heads, 63 sectors/track, 992 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 8064 * 512 = 4128768 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 991 3995680+ fd Linux raid
autodetect
Eored:~# hdparm -tT /dev/md0
/dev/md0:
Timing cached reads: 1730 MB in 2.00 seconds = 865.26 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 14 MB in 3.00 seconds = 4.67 MB/sec
Eored:~# hdparm -tT /dev/md1
/dev/md1:
Timing cached reads: 1986 MB in 2.00 seconds = 993.34 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 548 MB in 3.00 seconds = 182.53 MB/sec
Eored:~# pvdisplay
--- Physical volume ---
PV Name /dev/md1
VG Name pool
PV Size 8.19 TB / not usable 0
Allocatable yes
PE Size (KByte) 4096
Total PE 2146206
Free PE 208586
Allocated PE 1937620
Harry
Neil Davidson wrote:
> That's a lot of DVDs.
>
> I have about 600 disks (a lot from TV series box sets etc.) and even at
> ~8gig each (I doubt the average would be that high to be honest) gives you
> around the 4.5TB mark.
>
> And of course if you have 12 drives you would have them all as one large
> RAID-1 now would you :)
>
>
>> 12 x 750 = More TBs that you can shake a stick at
>>
>
> Or less than 7TB if you factor in 2x 6-drive RAID-5 arrays, and each drive
> only having about 700gig (counting as 1024 instead of 1000). Then there is
> RAID and file system overhead after that too :)
>
> 1TB drives look more appealing all the time...
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Brian Weeden
> Sent: 23 February 2007 00:10
> To: The Hardware List
> Subject: Re: [H] I think I found the solution to my HTPC storage problem
>
> On 2/22/07, Jin-Wei Tioh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>> 12 x 750 = More TBs that you can shake a stick at
>>
>>
>
> I calculate that I need about 8 TB if I want to store my entire DVD
> collection in vob format plus all the other stuff.
>
>
