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

[Gordon Marx]

Clearly the answer is RAIN (Redundant Array of Inexpensive NASes).

/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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