Re: 8TB of external storage?

On Wed, Nov 3, 2010 at 9:27 PM, Richard Lynch <[email protected]> wrote:
> 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...

good point about speed.  my PyCon video project results in moving 600G
onto a server each evening, and then doing more work once the data is
there.  over gig E it takes a few hours, and that basically cuts into
sleep.  I am looking at changing things around so that I don't have
that bottleneck

how does one backup 8T?

Or is the point of the box to be a collection of backups?

Or do you rely on raid to deal with disk fail and not worry about the
other risks.

huh - I wonder how google looks at this problem.

>
> 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
>>
>
>
> --
> brain cancer update:
> http://richardlynch.blogspot.com/search/label/brain%20tumor
> Donate:
> https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=FS9NLTNEEKWBE
>
>
> --
> Linux Users Of Northern Illinois (Chicago) - Technical Discussion
> http://luni.org/mailman/listinfo/luni
>



-- 
Carl K
-- 
Linux Users Of Northern Illinois (Chicago) - Technical Discussion 
http://luni.org/mailman/listinfo/luni