Berkeley CSUA MOTD:Entry 11794
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2025/07/08 [General] UID:1000 Activity:popular
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2004/1/15-16 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:11794 Activity:nil
1/15    I need a small NAS-RAID (on the order of 500 gigs or so) for a bunch of
        developers. I was thinking of constructing one from parts using
        SATA and Linux. Anyone got a better idea? Purpose is mainly for
        NFS mounting, so it has to have decent (although not blazingly fast)
        performance. I don't care that much about hot-swappability. Needs to
        be RAID 1 or above (redundancy at 2x is enough). I was thinking of
        spending maybe 4K on it.
                \_ If you want to provide NFS access don't use linux. Linux
                   has terrible NFS performance/reliability. FreeBSD is much
                   better at NFS (if you want to stick with a free/open os).
        \_ Apple Xserve RAID 1TB (500GB usable RAID 1) @ $6K, free kool-aid.
           \_ I said, you're very phunny.  Do you make yourself happy with your
              little joke?
        \_ This is easily doable for the budget you have in mind.  SATA
           seems nice, but I haven't seen any real world results for
           performance and failures.  Considering that you can buy 250G
           disks for $300 or less, you can easily do 500 gigs.  Do RAID 5
           you'll get more space.
           \_ I haven't gotten a SATA board/drive yet, AFAYK how many
              SATA drives can I reasonably dump into a box? If I can
              dump 8 of them in there I'll get more drives. Also, are there
              any more oustanding issues with Linux NFS hooking up to Solaris?
              (clients here at the office are all solaris boxen).
              \_ There are no major issues with linux/solaris using nfs.  You
                 may have to tweak some mount options to get super performance
                 but frankly your developers are unlikely to know the diff.
                 There are cases available that have room for as many as 20
                 drives.  16 is more common.  8 fits in a 2u box.  You have
                 many options.  -MSG
                 \_ Our Solaris 8/9 clients have lots of problems with
                    with Linux servers. Only v2 seems to work well on
                    Linux servers.
                    \_ Depends on what you call "problems".  Will it work at
                       full speeds with default settings?  Usually not.  Will
                       you have to read a man page and change one or two nfs
                       client mount options?  Yes.  Oh!  Horrors!  -MSG
                        \_ I'm not talking about full speed. I'm talking
                           about problems such as multiple simultaenous
                           reads hanging nfsd or cases where a client
                           writes a file but the file ends up truncated on
                           the server. Even if the clients mount using v2
                           such problems occur on a weekly basis for ordinary
                           files (esp. for files larger than 1gb).
        \_ There's no reason at all to use SATA.  Just go get a case, stick
           in motherboard, any cpu, and 256 megs and an 8 port ware card.
           attach 8 cheap ass 80 gig IDE drives in a raid5 stripe and forget
           about it.  Total price is way under 4k.  If you want it mirrored,
           then get 8x160 drives and mirror 4x160 stripes instead of raid5.
           Mr. Motd Storage Guru signing off.
        \_ That SATA/SATAN joke wasn't even close to funny.  There's tons of
           terms you can make risque by changing a letter.
           \- if you are a solaris shop, why dont you just take sun you
              presumably already have and just spend all of your budget on
              a small HWraid. assuming you feel your time is valuable,
              this may be the most convenient thing to do. --psb
              \_ This is a pretty good idea, too, but be careful what you get
                 for an external array.  Some are really crappy and I've lost
                 entire raid sets when it decided to go JBOD on me after a
                 hwraid unit crash.  I've had good luck with Arena raid
                 arrays attached to different systems.  --MSG
2025/07/08 [General] UID:1000 Activity:popular
7/8     

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