I have 2 problems.
1) With the shifting from home use to enterprise solutions. I'm a home user. Sticking with the movies for the purpose of the exercise, so far it was more or less a linear equation: rip more movies, need more space, buy new HDDs. The moment you move to an enterprise solution you stop paying for storage alone. You pay for everything, including the position of the clouds in the sky.
20 x 2TB WD Green at current (discounted) prices = $2800
Areca 1280ML -> ~$1050. Say again? Does it come with a TV, too? It's more then a third of the storage itself. I'm curious what did they put on it that's the equivalent of (arguably) 4 Xeon processors?? That chip on it that does XOR calculation, etc it's an Intel 800MHz IOP341 I/O. I'd like to know, if more knowledgeable people can explain it, what am I paying for?
Then come little aspects that you guys touched on already. Keep the array up. Well I'm not at home most of the day, so the thing will work let's say 5 hours a day daily and 24/7 on weekends. Fort the rest of time I'll just use 350-400W for... I don't know, heating the room with the array? That doesn't work in summer. But the electrical bill will get bigger regardless. More cost just to keep the elephant up all the time for no good.
Well, you power it up and down, the probability your drives will fail increases. Well there are 2 ways to look at this. You're a slave of the statistics that tell you have to go with RAID-6 for that many drives and keep them running at all times, or you don't (I acknowledge that very few people don't). Well if you're a business you'll go with the statistics; but I'm a home user. Here I have a problem. My life experience I can't find it in statistics. My mess of 15 drives, of various sizes and brands, going back to 300GB Maxtors are powered up and down around 300 times a year, for the last 5 years (the oldest) and no one failed. Including the 1.5TB Seagate that's red flagged everywhere. So, I don't dispute the statistics, but I'm wondering if there isn't some kind of psychosis induced to make you buy more expensive solutions - "YOUR DRIVES WILL FAIL!". And again, I'm not a business; remember how many hours I said I use this every day.
If the enterprise solution is the only solution I'll go with one. But I find there's some luck of interest to explore other, in-between solutions.
2) How much space. 40 TB sounds good (rounded up, assuming parity goes to some extra drives). But there is a scenario this won't do. If they start releasing series on Blu-ray. Battlestar Galactica is a 1TB affair, and that's just a 4 seasons series. I have something like 25 series already, mostly not in HD. If I'd be to upgrade them to Blu-ray specs, 40TB suddenly doesn't sound so much. Luckily I'm not one of those guys with 10000 DVD in their collection. That would really require more.
So what else is there? Backblaze and 45 drives in one case?
I'm not exactly sure how they run it - port multipliers and software RAID 6 in Linux? The case, the backplanes, the dual PSU, the port multipliers make... I don't know $1500-1700 (I've no idea if they actually sell it like that, but there's at least one blog out there with a guy that used the design). And again no $1000 RAID controller.
Thoughts?
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Topic: Drive prices (Read 14199 times)