INTERACT FORUM
Devices => PC's and Other Hardware => Topic started by: benn600 on March 28, 2009, 10:23:51 am
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After doing some research, I came up with this table that shows the approximate best price on Seagate drives at various capacities. Not long ago I was buying 500GB drives for $200. The 2TB drive is Western Digital.
| Dollars | Gigabytes | $ / GB |
| 60 | 500 | 0.12 |
| 80 | 1,000 | 0.08 |
| 130 | 1,500 | 0.087 |
| 300 | 2,000 | 0.15 |
Overall, 1TB drives are the best value. Surprisingly, 1.5TB drives are closely behind, though.
Unfortunately, the worst part about these huge drives is that when I looked at the reviews, I was not impressed. The Seagate drives have very recent reviews that talk about DOA drives and even one guy who lost a 20TB array because 5 drives failed so quickly! Are we doomed to endure vast data loss as these huge drives become more prevalent? To my surprise, the Seagate drives had about three times the negative reviews than the 1TB Western Digital drive. I've used WD drives almost exclusively for the longest time but heard that Google's huge tracking of drive failure found that WD is not among the best so was starting to consider Seagate.
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I think Seagate had major firmware issues over the past couple of months which may explain your findings
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2009/01/21/seagate_firmware_fix_breaks_barracudas/
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I bought a 1.5TB Seagate drive two weeks ago. Fine so far.
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Living on the edge there Jim ;)
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I think Seagate had major firmware issues over the past couple of months which may explain your findings
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2009/01/21/seagate_firmware_fix_breaks_barracudas/
True but as I described, there are reviews posted recently--yesterday or today--talking about all the problems. That scares me--especially when at some point I may buy 16 identical drives. Am I supposed to order an extra drive or two assuming a few will be DOA?? As long as I can remember I think I have only purchased one DOA drive. It was a 320GB Maxtor. It ended up being good, though, because I realized I didn't need that extra drive and got a refund.
In this checking it was nice to see 2TB drives are out there. What will the next size be?? 2.5TB, 3TB?
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I imagine some of these drives take a few months to go through the distribution channels, and much though i'd like to think that warnings were sent from Seagate, and the distributes responded appropriately, life aint perfect.
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Yea, I totally understand. It's just that this isn't a "dang this player doesn't play FLAC" thing. Lots of people rely on hard drives for their months/years worth of work and all too many don't have working or acceptable backup schemes. I know my backup scheme could be improved and I try to do so as time goes on...but it's always a battle between devoting serious time and not devoting serious time (but still not losing data, by chance)...
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All my storage is mirrored and I backup to jbod drives in rotation. My jbod cabinet can connect by USB or eSata. Both of my big mirrored storage boxes have both kinds of connections available. I also have a dongle for the jbod cabinet that plugs into the USB2 and turns the whole thing into a network (CIFS/FTP) storage server. I do no compression in my servers but compress the hell out of the backups.
Other people use a single or dual SATA drive 'dock' and manually insert drives as necessary to capture backups.
None of this is rocket science. And all of it is available at the local computer store.
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It is rocket science when you include incremental and offsite backups. Not that I do but if you consider your data vital and un-losable, then there is no extent to how overly protected you could try to be. To be true offsite it should probably be a few states over. Of course if an entire city was destroyed one would wonder if the people would have survived. Then is the data important?
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It's only rocket science if you choose to make it that way. Mirrored data drives and regular full backups to fast media (such as removeable disk drives) reduce or eliminate any requirement to perform incremental backups.
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Does anyone want to comment on their favorite hard drive manufacturer? I wonder if it is between Seagate and Western Digital...? I haven't seen Maxtor drives much lately in my general searching. Reliability is probably most important factor for a favorite HDD Mfr. to me.
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It is rocket science when you include incremental and offsite backups. Not that I do but if you consider your data vital and un-losable, then there is no extent to how overly protected you could try to be. To be true offsite it should probably be a few states over. Of course if an entire city was destroyed one would wonder if the people would have survived. Then is the data important?
Please tell me you're joking. Please.
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What about a really big meteor? Would a few states away be enough?
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Very true. I think the only way to be really sure is to set up a datacenter on the moon. Although if the Earth is destroyed it might take the moon with it. Might want to take a look at Mars. One of Jupiter's moons would be even better, although the latency might be a bit much.
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Very true. I think the only way to be really sure is to set up a datacenter on the moon. Although if the Earth is destroyed it might take the moon with it. Might want to take a look at Mars. One of Jupiter's moons would be even better, although the latency might be a bit much.
;D
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So that was interesting. Back to everyone's favorite brands.
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Back to everyone's favorite brands.
I want an Intel SSD.
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Seems WD has been my drive of choice lately. I had been using a WD MyBook for offsite backup until the USB connector on the thing broke. Soldered it back on but something else must be wrong and wouldn't you know it, it's a couple months over the warranty. Oh well, that prompted me to get an Acomdata 500GB portable (2nd one I have) to use for the offsite. Sure makes it a lot easier to carry back and forth. Not sure what drive is in it though and I don't plan on tearing it apart to find out.
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I have had failures with all the brands I have used so it is not necessarily brand-specific, and I think they have all gone through 'rough-spots' at various times or on certain models related to quality control and reliability.
In light of that I quickly learned early-on that good back-ups were a necesssity regardless of brand used.
This left another factor, cost. Not just initial cost or cost-per-gb, but cost-per-GB-per-year.
Since good shopping skils + patience can yield such a close cost-per-GB that brand is not much of a factor here it came down to life-expectancy/cost-per-year. Seagate, with their 5 year warranty, wins here.
I have had no more (and no less) drive failure with Seagate than I had with WD or Maxtor, but it has cost me nothing due to the long warranty.
So for now Seagate is my drive of choice, at least until I see another brand with the same or longer warranty for similar price.
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Hard drive warranties are great, but until they let me turn in a drive with the platters destroyed/removed, I'm not too keen on sending it in. I just consider the cost of a new drive ($130 usually) my paranoia/privacy tax.
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Personally, my experience with WD has been far better than with Seagate. This is most true when it comes to external drives, but does hold to some extent for internals as well.
At my workplace, my guys and I have had at least 8 external devices (branded as Seagate or Maxtor) die within months of purchase over the last 6 months.
I've now instructed our procurement arm to stop purchasing them. I should point out these are non-mobile externals, and are not subjected to the rigours of transport.
It's strange, as other people I know will tell almost the opposite story.....
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It's strange, as other people I know will tell almost the opposite story.....
The probability of flipping a coin a hundred times and getting nothing but heads is small but not zero, and the probability is identical to that for getting tails 100x. As you well know.
This explains a lot of things, and not just about drives.
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Excellent! My 16 WD drive server has seen failures but they have all been after the 3 year waranty has expired. I find seagste drives on newegg are dirt cheap compared to WD right now. I'm worried about reliability because of an above comment...cost per gigabyte per year <--very important when running 19 drives in a server! Otherwise it could easily mean a hundred bucks a month maintenance!
I've been a long time WD believer but Google found they aren't the most reliable so I got worried.
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I should mention that I still run several WD's and several Seagate's that are past-warranty, so both do have a good deal of durability on average.
I have also had replacements under warranty with each, seems more with Seagate, but when you factor in WD's shorter warranty length it comes pretty much back into balance.
Like Jim says, flip a coin
but a little research into a model's reputation and consumer ratings can't hurt ;)
Oh, Maxtor's were about the same as well, but haven't had any in a while.
* this is all referring to internal drives, most often one of the larger capacities available at the time of purchase.
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They never had this problem with punch cards.
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never buy drives from the same production lot, or even the same month. Spread your purchases out and you'll spread the risk of failure out.
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never buy drives from the same production lot, or even the same month. Spread your purchases out and you'll spread the risk of failure out.
Good idea. Do punch cards come in 1.5TB capacities? I like the idea of avoiding this problem.
The reviews on Newegg for the large Seagate drives looked horrible with a big percentage of 1 star reviews saying they were DOA or failed early...about 30% while WD drives only had 10% 1-star reviews. Granted people with a bad experience are much more likely to write.
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My 10cents. I have 6 SG barracuda 1.5TB's (bought from Dell on sale @ $89/ea). All same batch. all running 24/7 for almost 3 mths with no issues. I read the bad reviews & issues, but at that price thought I could afford to roll the dice...and at least to present seems to be paying off.
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Does anyone know of a good deal on 1TB or 1.5TB drives? I'm very close to building a new server. At the moment, the best price I am finding (WD) is $90 for 1TB and $130 for 1.5TB.
I'd really like to see $80 for 1TB or the above order of $90 for 1.5TB drives--what a bargain!
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Does anyone know of a good deal on 1TB or 1.5TB drives? I'm very close to building a new server. At the moment, the best price I am finding (WD) is $90 for 1TB and $130 for 1.5TB.
I'd really like to see $80 for 1TB or the above order of $90 for 1.5TB drives--what a bargain!
HITACHI 0A38016 1TB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive - OEM
[ http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145233&nm_mc=EMC-IGNEFL052609&cm_mmc=EMC-IGNEFL052609-_-HardDrives-_-L0A-_-22145233 ]
$79.00 includes free shipping, with Promo Code EMCLSNT27 $75.00
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I've been hoping to find the WD drives for $80 ($10 discount). I'm a bit leery of going with Hitachi, mainly because I don't know much about their reliability and those drives also only have 16MB cache.
Honestly, the 1TB green drives seem like the ideal purchase because they run quieter, cooler, etc. In a server with 22 of these drives that will really help. I may not need to upgrade my UPS. I read some specs and they average 1 watt less draw compared to the WD Black drives during seek. At idle, they save several watts.
My plan (subject to change) is a 20-hot swap bay case with all twenty devoted to a single array in RAID6+. My current card allows this and I hope this new Areca 24-port does as well. It basically means 3 parity drives. And one will be a hot spare. So 16TB + 3TB parity + 1TB hot spare.
My current setup is 16 500GB drives in RAID6 (no hot spare) = 7TB. This is literally down to 10GB free. I look at it that I could double all the data on the system, 14TB, and still have nice breathing room of 2TB.
The case also has a slim optical port which I'll put a slim DVD-RW drive in. Lastly, it can support a drive in the center and I expect that where the slim floppy bay is, I can put another drive. So this will allow me to have RAID1 for the OS drive. I will either use onhand 500GB drives or just get a few more 1TB green drives.
What size power supply will I need for this system?
Low-end Core 2 or Xeon (haven't decided yet) [65 watt]
4 - 8GB memory
Slim optical drive
Areca 24-port hardware RAID card
22 7200 RPM drives (green edition)
I tried to add it up and thought perhaps 400 watt. Can anyone recommend a redundant PSU on Newegg? All the cheaper ones seem to have poor reviews saying it's better to spend the money on a better single-unit.
Addition: Do hot spare drives literally stay spun up and ready to go? If they do, aren't they wearing? Shouldn't they be cold-spares?
I got the Newegg email too with the Hitachi drives. I can get four more (24 total) for the same price as 20 WD. The cache is no big deal because I'm not going for speed in any way. Capacity! Besides, I'll get plenty of speed. But I may jump on that deal. Thankfully it lasts about a week. Then I was reading that the Green drives are not good for RAID...oh great! I am incredibly concerned with a reliable setup--like the one I've got now. I'm keeping my current server for a very long time and may just use it as a large backup device--not that it will hold everything this new server will have :(
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Then I was reading that the Green drives are not good for RAID...oh great!
I was reading through your post and was tapping my fingers on the keyboard, ready to write exactly that. WD Green brand and RAID (even if build around a good controller like one of Areca's) is a no go. Black is more expensive. Personally I have a bunch of Samsung F1's that never had a problem with.
The 22 drives + Areca is a very cool setup which I'm pretty familiar with having researching and considering it for a while, but isn't kind of expensive, all in all, just for storage? (if you don't do video editing and the likes)
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I right now have the 7TB array full. We keep all of our digital media on it and video editing--especially HD video--eats it up. I'm constantly filming events and such. For the above server, it will cost around $3,700. That really isn't too bad considering it is for 16TB. For $4,500 I can build 24TB (1.5TB drives) and that's probably what we'll do.
The last server I built (7TB) cost around $5,000. That was almost exactly two years ago. So in two years, for a little less money, I can have more than 3 times the storage space. Amazing. I just keep thinking about Blu Ray and how those discs are so big. This new server wouldn't even flinch at Blu Ray capacity!! I greatly prefer lump one-time purchases over having to constantly dump smaller amounts of money into things so if I can do this right...although last time I thought I did it right. It was the perfect size for about 1.5 years and then it started feeling full.
Perhaps Seagate 1.5TB drives since they seem to have the trouble worked out with new firmware.
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Who wants to help calculate the MTBF or any statistics on these arrays:
Array 1
16 drives - 500GB
2 drives can fail (RAID6)
12.5% parity
Array 2
19 drives - 1,500GB
3 drives can fail (RAID6+)
15.8% parity
[one hot spare]
Array 3 [later addition]
21 drives - 1,500GB
3 drives can fail (RAID6+)
14.3% parity
[one hot spare]
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remember the problem I pointed out with buying all of your drives from the same production lot.
You also need to bounce the drive cost vs real-world throughput in a raid setup.
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Well that thing with video editing kind of explains it :). Specific hardware, for specific needs. Blu-Ray does kick the requirements up, so better be safe. What case you have in mind? Norco (newegg)?
And I imagine you read threads like this (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1071162) and maybe this (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=940972) on Avsforum.
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I keep changing what I'm after. I go from absolute cheapest possible (Norco) and then decide the Supermicro offers enough extra. Lately I realized the key is to break the hardware apart from the hard drives because they really are quite separate. My latest round is a bit more pricey but will allow me to get 27TB of space, $5,500 or so. It's the Supermicro 24-bay case where 22 will be for the big array and 2 for the OS.
22 - 3parity - 1spare = 18 drives * 1.5TB = 27TB
It is truly a balance because I can easily get the price down, but that means less space. This latest round also includes a quad-core Xeon, better motherboard, server-grade everything. So the extra thousand dollars (over $4,500) yields some noticeable items.
A redundant power supply is sounding better and better, not to mention the extra 4 bays in the Supermicro. This means that I get 2 extra drives for the big array (3TB) but the OS drives are also in hot swappable bays--very nice. The optical drive is in the back of the case (very space efficient). Plus, I feel that the Supermicro case is probably more in the league of my current Chenbro case. Both seem to be decent-quality brands. The Norco, I believe, weighs a lot less and surely doesn't have all the features.
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Well that thing with video editing kind of explains it :). Specific hardware, for specific needs. Blu-Ray does kick the requirements up, so better be safe. What case you have in mind? Norco (newegg)?
And I imagine you read threads like this (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1071162) and maybe this (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=940972) on Avsforum.
Those threads are unbelievable. I guess at this point, I'll keep doing light research and watch for a great deal on the 1.5TB drives.
How smart would it be to start with, say, 12TB and lots of empty bays and then add more 1.5TB drives as needed and expand the array? I must insist that all the data is on the same array because it makes mapping and remotely connecting to the server much simpler. If I reorganize data there is no cross-drive (interdrive) slowness. It's all intradrive then.
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Those threads are unbelievable. I guess at this point, I'll keep doing light research and watch for a great deal on the 1.5TB drives.
How smart would it be to start with, say, 12TB and lots of empty bays and then add more 1.5TB drives as needed and expand the array?
That would've been my approach should I went that way. You don't need max space right now, just some more, and in the coming months may be in the position to take advantage of lower prices. Just make sure they don't retire the type of HDD, 'cause I wouldn't be too happy mixing different models even if of the same brand. Then again at the numbers you're working with, there is not much of savings overall, ~$200 if the prices drop 20 bucks per drive or so.
Regarding another thing you touched a bit above, depending on the Areca you have I believe it should do array spin-up/spin-down, if aiming to save power.
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I have found the spin down to be useless in my particular application. There are a few reasons:
1. Spin up obviously draws a lot of power and could trigger a PSU failure if it happens a few times every day.
2. This server is very versatile. I host several domains (many are for development purposes) and web site traffic nearly requires constant availability.
3. Even without web applications, I would often experience a 10+ second delay when trying to access the array. This irritates me as I wonder if there is a problem and is very annoying when it happens a time or two every day (morning mainly).
4. I've heard all too often how it is so much better to run equipment (that can handle it) 24/7 rather than on/off all the time.
5. The premise for this server is really always on. At night, I have a lot of automatic processes such as downloading podcasts, running email / database / etc. backups. All of these require the array to be available.
6. At times, I have had minutely / hourly actions that would download security camera images from our cameras and weather images from our local channel. This way, our local computers can have instant and archived access to these images.
I'm amazed I came up with that many reasons. As far as the WD Green drives goes: what I probably need are 5400 RPM drives. I'm not after speed all that much because these cards typically top out at 600MB/sec regardless of the drive count (past 10 probably), speed, etc. Even worse: I'm limited by the gigabit Ethernet connection. I would be greatly interested in 10-gigabit networking on my main computers and this server if the prices are within reason.
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From what you're describing, no. 4 pretty much wraps it up. At that kind of activity is indeed better to leave the equipment always on.
10Gigabit is too "emerging", cost is too high (you'll build a couple of more TB file servers for that kind of money). I've only seen solutions like that done on fiber.
I'm not sure at this point if you're talking about your home that became also an office or about your office and you're planning to live there too :) :)
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This seems to be the best case choice:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811152124
$950 includes a 900 watt 1+1 redundant power supply. The power supply alone is worth the difference from the Norco to the Supermicro. Other advantages of the Supermicro over the Norco ($290) are:
1. Forces me to get the much needed redundant PSU.
2. Allows for 2 more drives in the main array (3TB more).
3. The OS drives are in hot-swap carriages rather than strictly internal.
4. I have a Supermicro motherboard in mind and it supposedly has quick connectors for same-brand components.
5. Much heavier case--better build quality overall.
6. The slim optical drive goes in the back, out of sight for the 99% of the time it is not needed (only during OS install).
I'd really like to go with another Chenbro but the 24-port case seems to cost well over two grand.
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For 10-gb networking to even be possible, it needs to run over regular Cat5e cable. I don't even want to think about running more cable.
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This seems to be the best case choice:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811152124
$950 includes a 900 watt 1+1 redundant power supply. The power supply alone is worth the difference from the Norco to the Supermicro. Other advantages of the Supermicro over the Norco ($290) are:
Read this (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1150176), they build arguments pro and against these 2 cases better than I could. Personally I do not believe in a $600 difference but obviously you;re seeing these from a different angle, which in the end may be working better from you.
It's not the first time I hear the Supermicro is very loud, whoever has it got it mounted in the basement somewhere and ran cables through the house.
I can't remember where on Avsforum was it but they measured the power draw on these dual PSU server chasis. Conclusions where 2:
- the draw is not that high (900W is overkill unless you wanna put the server at work for something else - encoding?). What's the power consumption for a drive, at max? By some measurements a Samsung F1 1TB is ~11W at random read. Times 24... go figure.
- the second PSU is definitely for backup, not load balancing (as you intended, I'm just throwing this in just for fun). The main PSU hold the fort, the second one draw 2-5W just to stay alive.
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Good article. I'm totally for saving money here. When I've been talking to Promise tech support or other people and tell them I'm running a 16-drive setup on a single PSU, they all gasp. Is that just because that is crazy in a business environment? I just think as the drive count gets larger and larger a power failure could be more likely to be catastrophic.
This server is in the closet immediately adjacent to our theater. If I can get a quieter server, I'd love to. We hear the current server in the theater a tiny bit. Quieter would be better. Is the redundant PSU the main problem? My current Chenbro has 5 high power hot-swappable fans that seem to create the majority of the noise.
Oh, and where is the 24 bay Norco they reference??? That would knock out several of my points. I like the Supermicro also because it has an 80+ PSU -- or at least the 1200 watt has an 80+ Gold PSU and I can't even find an 80+ redundant PSU on Newegg.
So ~$300 for Norco + $100 single PSU? $550 savings! Total = $5K then. I was originally using a baseline core 2 with a simpler motherboard. Upgrading to a Xeon (quad-core), DDR3, and nicer motherboard added $350 or so.
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Supermicro rack mounts tend to sound like an L-1011 taking off.
The more drives you have the more likely a power glitch will cause all kinds of neato things to happen. A drive doesn't have to actually fail for the system to start rebuilding it.
You could also try a number of external esata jbods. They'd end up being about the same price but would bundle the disks together in smaller groups.
Anywho.
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Does anyone know when the Norco 24-bay chassis will be released? I couldn't find a contact link on Norco's site.
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Why do server motherboards often include multiple network ports? One motherboard I'm looking at has four! Can I get four times the bandwidth somehow? That would be very intriguing!
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We have a virtual server with eight network ports. Each "bottle" can run a different OS and each has a dedicated network port.
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The reason for multiple ports is that you can attach to multiple networks. You can also use this for redundancy, load balancing and failover.
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We have a virtual server with eight network ports. Each "bottle" can run a different OS and each has a dedicated network port.
That, too.
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So consider my case. I do not need virtualization and have only one network. It is a mix of gigabit and 100mbit switches and devices. Can I benefit at all? Clearly certain motherboards will have certain advantages but network port count should not be an overwhelming reason for a specific device. They don't impact the price much at all, obviously, maybe $5 - $10 per port but it's difficult to realize the actual difference when one with 4-Ethernet ports might also have another advantage.
I am staying far away from a dual processor system, too. This needs to be fairly powerful but keeping power usage lower is also very important.
Does anyone have any idea when the Norco 24-bay case will be released? At this point, that's the biggest reason why the Norco is not a good choice. It means 3TB less total space and the two OS drives cannot be in hot swappable carriages. (it has 20 bays, $290).
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For link aggregation you need network adapters (and/or switch) that support the 802.3ad standard (that's the difference between other things, from a $9 network adapter to a $25 Intel one; talking about "the other end", not the server; depends what you have there). The network ports should be the same speed, no mixing. Generally the teaming is taken care by the drivers provided by the manufacturer and less by the Windows OS (who supports... does it support anything?).
What you would be getting (besides load balancing and fail-over mentioned previously) is a 2 gigabit bandwidth not a 2 gigabit speed. Which would mean i.e. 2 peers can connect both at 1 gigabit speed to the server, but one peer alone won't jump to 2 gigabit speed. If it ads anything for you good, if not... movies will play in more simple configurations ;).
I've looked up the 24-bay Norco but there's none in sight. On Avsforum there are a lot of insiders from various manufacturers or at the very least people connected within various branches of AV industry and the likes. The comment about the 24-bay was made yesterday so it may take awhile. Otherwise I believe Norco has a phone number on their site, for sales and the likes.
Regarding PSU, you can see a 20-bay Norco build around one PSU here (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=16532571). The long looks you've gotten when mentioning one PSU only for 20-something drives, might've been from people expecting you to run 10K SAS drives in a business critical environment.
Not that I'm against 2 PSU. In case you do go for Supermicro I guess one thing to look at would be to change the fans to something quieter, which is doable.
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consider getting yourself a 1/2 height rack mount cabinet and hanging it from the ceiling.
Once you move to rack mounts your drive density 'problem' will be lessened.
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How many decibels does the Supermicro generate? If someone can provide me with a figure, I will measure my current Chenbro server. I suppose you should stand one meter away, right?
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If 65db is a vacuum... close to a vacuum! :) :) This is from the top of my head.
And remember db is a logarithmic scale.
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Has anyone tried unRAID? It appears to give basically RAID5 protection but if two drives do fail, only the additional drive that failed is actually lost. So you would lose one drive of data rather than the entire array.
It doesn't appear to offer RAID6. In any array beyond, say, 10 drives, I wouldn't even consider less than RAID6 anymore. My current system is running RAID6 and I did have dual drive failure one time. There is no worse time while you wait for it to rebuild. Thankfully, rebuilding the first parity is much faster than the second so I was able to restore "degraded" status in short order--just a few hours on a 500GB drive. That was with 16 drives. With 21 I am hoping to get RAID6+ / RAID-TP (triple parity) in addition to a hot spare. I now realize how helpful a hot spare would be. It can save anywhere from 1 - 48 hours of running degraded. It's even worse if you're out of the state when the failure happens.
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Did you go with Supermicro? By a recent post (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1154444) yesterday on AVSForum, the Norco 24 bay is still on the drawing board. So I guess that settles it.
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I am ready to order and am now just awaiting a good deal. 1.5TB drives are $130 now but they were discounted to $120 several days back--if only I could get this again. That equates to at least $240 savings.
The current server has 7TB. There are basically three potential new configurations:
18TB - 1TB drives in 24-bay
21TB - 1.5TB drives in 20-bay
27TB - 1.5TB drives in 24-bay
With whatever setup I go with, 2 will be for RAID1 for the OS, one for a hot-spare, and 2 (or 3 if available) drives for parity (RAID6 or RAID6+ / Triple Parity).
If the RAID card I select doesn't support triple parity then I could end up with 28.5TB but I am hoping for the added reliability. A hot spare should help a bit too. Another nice opportunity is that I will keep the current server available for probably several months. Once the new server has truly proven reliability, I will likely reinstall the existing server software and reconfigure it for a backup server or something. It's probably worth a little more than a thousand bucks, unfortunately. I realized that selling an old server with a ton of drives is really playing on the old/used up realization because clearly the drives are more likely to fail now then years ago...of course that's the same with cars too.
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27TB Planned Configuration (feedback please)
Case, Supermicro 24-bay, $950
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811152124
CPU, Intel Xeon Quad-Core Kentsfield 2.4GHz, $205
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819117127
Motherboard, Supermicro Dual LAN, $205
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182145
Memory, Crucial 4 x 2GB (8GB) Fully Buffered server memory, $192
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148189
RAID Card, Areca 24-port, $1,200
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816151037
27 x Drives, Seagate 1.5TB SATA, $130 each
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148337
I have to think that a drive or might be DOA and it's good to have a brand new drive available at all times (two once settled in). The total is right around $6K. My plan is to wait for a sale, ideally on the hard drives. Each drop of $10 saves $250. Newegg also offers combo discounts at times.
Addition: I sent a volume discount request to Newegg. I tried doing so a while back for a little less elaborate server and they didn't give me any additional discounts.
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Seagate 1.5TB is $120 now.
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I saw that, too. I'm awaiting a response from Newegg for my volume discount request.
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After calling Newegg, I was told to place my order and then submit my information for a refund of a discount--very strange. Either way, I was glad to hear that because I wanted to at least lock in the $120/ea price. So I did place the order and then sent another email to the volume discount request people at Newegg updating them on the situation. I put target prices in for the items that are probably beyond their abilities but who knows.
Addition: My plan is to build it and copy all the good, highly organized data over. This mainly includes copying the static data over and then somehow switching everything over. For easiness, I could use the same server name and share name: //Chenbro/Titanium
However, I think I'm ready for a new name. Does anyone have a procedure or ritual for naming servers? I've really only named the existing one...previously it was what the drive contained: Music, Video, etc...now I focus on a single large drive to reduce overhead. But for naming, beryllium is very appealing at the moment. However, shorter is incredibly more desirable...so tin?
//Tin/Beryllium
Is there any way to skip the folder-- //Tin/...? That would mean I couldn't share anything else on this system (which would probably be bad) but it would be convenient.
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Newegg wrote back. They only offer volume discounts on these drives at quantities of 50 or more. I figured they would look at the order as a whole and offer a discount overall. Now I am working with another reseller to order some accessories for the Supermicro case (which Newegg doesn't sell). I plan to order 2 extra hot-swap carriages, 2 internal fixed drive backets, locking front bezel, spare redundant PSU. The prices for these components is so much more reasonable than for my previous Chenbro case. I think the hot-swap carriages were $30 or $40 each with that. Here they are $12! I plan to wait until it arrives so I make sure I order exactly what I need--no more, no less. All too often I assume that the documentation is correct. Things get changed and not updated.
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Hmm, that's kind of wrong, not giving you any discount. After all they offer combo deals on I don't know how many things, that usually price-wise are between 5 and 10% of your order. Too bad.
Anyways, it goes without saying that we'd expect some pictures of the ... demon and all its parts once it arrives :)
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I agree that it's ridiculous. Clearly they could give a discount, especially when I made special effort to bundle everything I ordered into a single order. It should all arrive by Friday, giving me the weekend to start assembling.
My latest mental thought process has led me to a slightly modified system configuration. I am going to not install the slim drive, but rather, add two internal fixed drives. These will be for the OS in RAID1. This frees up two more hot-swap bays. Ultimately, this will allow 30TB total storage space. This is nice because it's more space with only giving up the permanent optical (not necessary once OS is installed) plus the entire RAID card's 24-ports will be for this single array. I'll plug the two OS drives into the motherboard and mirror them. I'm sure I'll add 2 or 3 partitions to the OS drives because I need the OS + Shadow Copy for 30TB Array + Backups. I'd like to keep these somewhat separated out. Perhaps 750GB for system, 500GB for Shadow Copy, and 250GB for backups (email server, web server, whatever)...
I think the next logical progression in this post is to give a real reason for this upgrade. It will allow me to actually function again. I can't wait to see the final AFTER shot of this. I plan to install Vista on my workstation so it will look a bit different if I do before taking the pic. Sadly, it will take 2-3 weeks minimum to get this setup due to Array preparation time and copying 7TB of data over gigabit networking...all AFTER I get the OS setup and going.
(http://ppcpathways.com/public/server/current.jpg)
And the graph predictions:
(http://ppcpathways.com/public/server/graphs.jpg)
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Having a single home LAN, would there be any reason for me to use both ethernet ports on this server motherboard? The RAID card also has an ethernet jack, should I plug this into the main LAN?
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I would like to continue the build log in a new thread. See here:
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=52549