RAID5 for Linux

[jjohnson at sunrise-linux.com (miah)]

I guess high price depends on your idea of high price.  I just ordered two systems from asacomputers (www.asacomputers.com), one, a 1u, with 1TB of SATA RAID5 diskspace (3 drives), dual opteron, for $3k, and a  4u with 1.6TB of SATA RAID5 (8 drives, upgradable to 4TB, or 16drives), for $5200, not bad really, a Dell 1u with 768gigs of space was about $17,000.  These two systems both use 3ware, we have the 1u already and its great.  I can't wait until the 4u gets here.

-miah

On Wed, Apr 28, 2004 at 12:44:08PM -0400, Rich Braun wrote:
> Bob Keyes wrote:
> > At my new job, we have a NAS "Snap Appliance", which is pretty
> > horrible and I want to get rid of it. So I am going to push for
> > a Linux solution. I'd want RAID level 5, and Serial ATA drives,
> > and of course linux niceness. I was looking at the Adaptec
> > 2810SA, but it's got 8 ports..I though you needed 9 for RAID5
> > (one for each bit plus one parity) or am I misunderstanding
> > this? I'd also want hot-swappable. Anyone have any suggestions?
> 
> I've read through some of the responses and have a couple things to add:
> 
> - I think the Snap product *is* Linux-based.  What you're wanting, of course,
> is control over the O/S environment in your server.
> - You don't say explain what features of the NAS box make it horrible in your
> situation, or what level of performance you're lokoing for.
> - The stated requirements of serial ATA and hot-swap imply high-end hardware
> that will come at a hefty price.  I'm frugal, personally, and generally
> question whether high-priced features really fit the bill.  For example,
> hot-swap can be justified on a mail server at an ISP but not at most 9-to-5
> corporate sites where it's easy enough to shut the system off for 5 minutes at
> the end of the workday.  Serial ATA can be justified if you need 15,000rpm
> drives because the system is handling 1000 transactions per second in a
> banking app, but not if you're running a Clearcase server for a half-dozen VB
> programmers.
> - A $75 motherboard with a $85 CPU has enough horsepower and IDE ports to run
> software RAID1 or RAID5 on four drives in 98% of the environments that I've
> seen.
> - You don't get any penalty for running RAID1 in software, and you can't get a
> performance boost running RAID1 in hardware, on a 2-drive system.  You would
> get a performance boost running hardware RAID5 vs. software RAID5, but the
> boost may not be measurable if your application is not I/O-bound.
> 
> Advances in hardware performance have outraced application requirements in
> most situations for a few years now.  Just because a high-end product is
> available does not mean it's worth paying the premium.
> 
> > For backup, I am thinking the Sony AIT-2 changer, LIB-D81/A2. Don't
> > know if it's compatible with Bacula though...
> 
> Thumbs up to AIT-2.  I use a Cybernetics/Spectra changer for my AIT-2 drive at
> home.  The SCSI standard for changers is widespread:  any brand should work
> with any Linux or Windows software.  I use amanda for backups and am
> more-or-less happy with it, though I wish it were more popular and were
> getting more new features and bug-fixes.
> 
> -rich
> 
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