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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 > > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > Discuss at blu.org > http://www.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss >
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