On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 02:51:35PM +1100, Daniel Pittman wrote: > Sonia Hamilton <[email protected]> writes: >
[snip] > > > If so, any recommendations for a mobo that takes a large number of > > SATA drives (eg 6 or 8) and doesn't have some weird BIOS thing that > > requires Windoze to support said large number of drives? > > It is pretty trivial to get a standard AHCI SATA controller for six > drives, although 8 are less common. A 4 port AHCI PCIe SATA controller > is fairly inexpensive though... I would recommend amd 5200+ & gigabyte ma78gm-s2h+2gb from fluidtek.com.au, 5 sata and a Adaptec 1430SA SATA II RAID Controller - 4 Port $199 from techbuy. I put this together in a tower case with 4G of ram, with 9 x 1T drives ($150 / drive fluidtek). works really well with debian amd etch ( and above). The one caveat is you have to compile your own nic driver the one in the kernel doesn't support the one on the motherboard. or ga-m750sli-ds4 (6 sata) again with the adaptec card (works out the box). For a total of 10 x 1Tb (raid6). had some problems with optical out with this mb, because it was so new, but 1.0.18 fixed that. both have gige nics Alex (recent buys in the last 12 months) > > Now for the but: > > The NAS devices are generally less power hungry, and sometimes less > noisy, than building your own NAS solution. They also (generally) come > with hot-swap disks rather than fixed. > > Building a PC that has hot-swap will generally cost you more than buying > the NAS. > > Finally, the NAS kit usually performs less well than the PC, which > matters for high IOPS or streaming workloads, but hardly at all for > normal use. > > (Notably: you see somewhere between 1/4 and 1/10th the performance with > the NAS device compared to local SATA with RAID, depending on the sort > of testing being done.) > > > Personally, I ended up with a server with hot-swap SATA, and am happy > with that — but I a new server anyhow, and it cost less than buying a > new server /and/ NAS storage. > > Once it fills up (6 SATA disks, possibly 8 if I get enthusiastic) my > plan is to start a collection of the NSS4000 units. They run nothing > but Linux, are *fully* source-available, and should be able to be > upgraded to a real distribution if I wanted... > > They also do ATAoE, so I can mount their disks via a back-end gigabit > network and talk to them directly as high latency local disk in my > server, allowing me to manage them nicely without having to buy an > NSS6000 and live with their built-in limits... > > (Plus, I prefer to have a sensible server doing access control, etc, > rather than trusting an appliance to do it — it reduces the number of > places I have to worry about problems cropping up.) > > > Does that help, or just confuse things more? Feel free to ask if you > have more questions about any particular part of my writeup. > > Regards, > Daniel > > Footnotes: > [1] Sorry for shouting; the vendor does. :/ > > -- > SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ > Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html > -- We cannot do everything at once, but we can do something at once. -- Calvin Coolidge
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature
-- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
