Re: 8TB of external storage?

I have no idea what to recommend, but I have spotted a lack of speed
requirements here...

I suspect that you should have a minimum speed target for the
read/write tasks...

But I dunno what I'm talking about, as I've never needed anything like
8TB...

I accidentally built a 1TB audio server one time, with JBOD, but that
was like, an accident, really...

I used a case and MOBO from a dumpstered tower and crammed a bunch of
hard drives in it and df -h added up to 1TB. :-)

It worked quite well over the course of the several years it was in
service before the priorities of the client changed... It's in my
basement at the moment.

On Wed, November 3, 2010 4:19 pm, David Ehle wrote:
>
> Hello all,
>
> Long time lurker, wanted to see if anyone has any experience and
> suggestions regarding medium-large storage solutions.
>
> I need to upgrade and consolidate our storage backups.
>
> I would like to start with 6-8TBs
>
> I want it rack mountable.
>
> I want to run RAID5 or RAID6, and be able to add more/larger drives to
> the
> array in the future to expand it.
>
> It must speak sweetly to linux.
>
> I've looked at NAS solutions like products by Drobo,QNAP,Thecus and
> they
> seem to be about the most cost effective... but now that linux
> supports
> expanding software RAID on the fly, I'm not really sure they offer
> anything extra and add an extra layer of potential failure / lockin /
> interface.
>
> Dell/IBM solutions just cost too much and are overengineered for the
> task
> at hand.
>
> Buying a new system with 8 hotswap sas/sata bays is an option, but
> expensive. (compared to a NAS black box)
>
> Buying an external enclosure is cost competitive to Drobo/Qnap/Thecus
> black box solutions, but I would want esata or SAS connectivity... and
> while I've done eSATA I have not done much work with external SAS. I'm
> not
> sure if how the drives will be presented to the OS if enclosure is
> connected via 1 cable.  iSCSI is also an option I guess but then
> wouldn't
> I need a "smart" box rather than JBOD backplane?  If going this route,
> would I go with just some vendors "a esata/SAS card" or would I need
> some
> sort of hardware RAID card?
>
> Anyone else delt with a similar situation? Any insite or advice?
>
> I've thought about some of the Storage distributions like
> Openfiler/OpenNas - but I don't really feel like learning BSD for this
> project, and I think opensolaris based projects are going to die do to
> lack of support now that Oracle has abandoned OpenSolaris (bye bye ZFS
> :P)
>
> Any experience with Drobo/Qnap/Thecus?  Which is most linux friendly?
> Which can you take the disks and attach them to something else if the
> hardware dies? (Drobo is out because of this, Qnap uses "custom" ext3
> version but is readable from bootable ISO, thecus I'm not sure about)
>
> Anywy thanks for listening to me think out loud... what's your input?
>
> Thanks!
>
> David.
>
>
> --
> Linux Users Of Northern Illinois (Chicago) - Technical Discussion
> http://luni.org/mailman/listinfo/luni
>


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