[Discuss] NAS: lots of bays vs. lots of boxes

[ozbek at gmx.com (F. O. Ozbek)]

On 07/10/2015 01:15 PM, Gordon Marx wrote:
> Clearly the answer is RAIN (Redundant Array of Inexpensive NASes).
>

I love it!

Well, MooseFS is exactly that. RAIN. (Along with glusterfs, etc, etc.)


> /me rushes to trademark, monetize
>
> On Fri, Jul 10, 2015 at 1:13 PM, Kent Borg <kentborg at borg.org> wrote:
>> On 07/10/2015 12:36 PM, Richard Pieri wrote:
>>>
>>> The answer to this conundrum is simple: disks are consumables like toner
>>> and paper and batteries.
>>
>>
>> Certainly. But as with batteries, the technology changes, and there are
>> qualitative consequences. For example, the Wikipedia article on RAID says
>> that Dell recommends against RAID 5 with disks 1TB or larger on some Dell
>> product-or-other, because the very act of rebuilding the array will possibly
>> kill other old drives in your array before the data has been copied. RAID 6,
>> as I understand it, is better by surviving two failures, but it only pushes
>> the problem back and probably also becomes too risky with 2015-sized drives.
>>
>> I can imagine someone putting together a swell RAID 5 package of the
>> slickest 8TB disks available, with plenty of spares to be extra safe, and
>> after a couple years of great performance one disk dies and the rest commit
>> suicide over the next few days in a sickening cascade as the array tries to
>> rebuild itself. Performing admirably the entire time!--until the data is
>> lost. Doesn't matter if the 8TB drives cost $50 or $800, they could all die
>> in a horrible capacity-induced pile up, taking some vital 24x7x365 system
>> with it.
>>
>> Declaring "they're consumables!" doesn't answer questions about how one
>> would wisely fill up and use a 24-bay box.
>>
>> -kb
>>
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