---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Michael Evans <[email protected]> Date: Sat, Oct 31, 2009 at 7:24 PM Subject: Re: [SLL] OT: NEC SAN To: John Aldrich <[email protected]>
On Sat, Oct 31, 2009 at 2:50 PM, John Aldrich <[email protected]> wrote: > On Friday 30 October 2009, you wrote: > > What are your needs and what product are you currently thinking of > > filling them with? > > > Oh, and we're looking at starting out with about 2-3 Terabytes of storage > available and possibly adding another 2-3 Terabytes later on, probably > topping out at about 5 Terabytes. > If you want hardware solutions that can be build with off the shelf technology: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816103099 The controllers start at around $550 It uses a PCI-Express x8 slot and has 8 ports for drives. You could build a raid 6 set out of 5x1TB drives and fulfill your final target size; it still has two slots left for hot-spares. You could also use 1.5+tb drives in a raid 1+0 set or other similar solutions. Home. <http://www.newegg.com/Index.aspx?name=Home> > Computer Hardware0_.<http://www.newegg.com/Store/Computer.aspx?name=Computer-Hardware> > Hard > Drives1_.<http://www.newegg.com/Store/Category.aspx?Category=15&name=Hard-Drives> > Controllers / RAID Cards2_.<http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCategory.aspx?SubCategory=410&name=Controllers-RAID-Cards> > *Internal Connectors[8 x SATA II ],Internal Connectors[16x SATA II ],Internal Connectors[12x SATA II ],Internal Connectors[24 x SATA II ],Internal Connectors[8 x SAS ],Internal Connectors[16 x SAS ],Internal Connectors[12 x SAS ],Internal Connectors[24 x SAS ],Interface[PCI-Express x8 ],* returned *11* results. If performance isn't as important as solution cost software raid (linux/bsd/windows all support variants) may be sufficient. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816132003 So you can support a few extra drives. Raid 1+0 based solutions have virtually no CPU overhead; raid 5/6 solutions, in my experience, are quite effective for large rarely changed files (mythtv backend as an example). Software raid is, slowly, getting better. The recenly released mdadm 3.1 software supports reshaping raid5 to raid6. However if you require absolute performance hardware controllers are still the way to go. Compared to potentially much more expensive and difficult to support solutions: http://www.google.com/products?q=nec+D3+controller you may be better off building your own box entirely. Looking at motherboards on newegg it's a little difficult to find an explicitly -server- motherboard that fulfills your needs, however many desktop solutions exist, and there were a few server solutions that looked semi-useful. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131596 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131134 Oh, and in case you're wondering about all the newegg links. There's no relationship or anything like that; they just have the best set of tools for narrowing down products and usually have prices that are, if not the lowest, low enough to make going with a known good retailer better than chancing a unknown second party.
