NAS/Storage Megathread: What is this "File Deletion" You Speak of

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > NAS/Storage Megathread: What is this "File Deletion" You Speak of

frunksock: Feb 21, 2002

I need recommendations on 5.25" -> 3.5" SATA enclosures. That is - one of those things that takes up 3 5.25" bays and converts them to 4 or 5 3.5" bays, ideally with power and SATA connections (doesn't need to be hot-swap tho).

Also, if anyone offhand knows a good cheap 4 port PCIe SATA controller that works with Solaris. Failing that, I'd buy (2) 2 port PCI SATA controllers, if someone has a recommendation on those. I don't need any RAID features.

# ¿ Aug 18, 2009 17:04

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 13:37

frunksock: Feb 21, 2002

IOwnCalculus posted:

I have this Supermicro and I like it a lot, though keep in mind it is pretty drat long. If you're trying to stuff this in a mid-tower case, you may run into interference issues with the motherboard like I did. Also, it's not really meant to slide into a desktop case which has all sorts of tabs and poo poo for mounting single-bay 5.25" devices, so get ready to get creative with the Dremel.

I haven't seen any cheap 4-port PCIe SATA controllers; the only cheap PCIe ones right now are 2-port. I grabbed a cheap generic one with a Silicon Image chipset and it worked great in Ubuntu, no idea on Solaris support.

Yeah, this is going into a Antec P150, and I'd prefer not to have to Dremel anything, unless there are no products that fit without doing that. I'll comb the Solaris HCL if there's not a card the Solaris people here like.

# ¿ Aug 18, 2009 17:35

frunksock: Feb 21, 2002

Scratch2k posted:

I use this:

http://www.pccasegear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=5630

(site is in Australia, so don't try and order unless you're are too)

and it fits perfectly in my old antec mini tower despite it having those wacky side mounted rails which you usually screw in to the side of the optical drives, I just slid it in and it fit nice and snug...no sata or power connectors but it does have a cooling fan.

This looks pretty much perfect, thank you. One of the newegg reviews says it fits fine in an Antec Solo (which I think is identical to my P150 other than color scheme).

# ¿ Aug 19, 2009 08:55

frunksock: Feb 21, 2002

What's the 1TB or 1.5TB drive of choice for you guys in your small NAS boxes these days? I'm going to be expanding mine (currently 4x300GB, adding 4x1TB or 4x1.5TB). The box is in the closet, so noise isn't a primary concern. The network will probably be the throughput bottleneck (1gigabit). So, I guess reliability and random IO performance are my main priorities. It'll be a 3+1 RAID-Z volume. I've always assumed I didn't want the 5400/5900rpm drives, but I'd look at them. Are the Seagate 1.5TB drives still as lovely as they were reported to be a year or so ago?

# ¿ Aug 23, 2009 00:25

frunksock: Feb 21, 2002

TheNothingNew posted:

Question for the thread: how long, at a guess, does it take to set up the initial sync for a RAID array? RAID 5 (5+1), with 1TB drives, ~4.5 TB useable. 5400 rpm drives, 64kb stripe.
It's just that there isn't a countdown or anything, and this has been running for the last six hours. Still says "initialize" under status.

I just made a 3+1 RAID-Z array with 1TB drives. It took, I dunno, 100ms? No amount of time long enough that I could really perceive it.

At this point, for a NAS, I'd need to have a pretty drat good reason to not use Solaris.

# ¿ Sep 3, 2009 05:03

frunksock: Feb 21, 2002

moep posted:

It is a neat idea but I wouldn�t want to be a customer there.

What happens when their fancy $38 80GB PATA Boot drive bites the dust?
They clearly have no RAID1 or tape backup in place for such an event.

Cheap is nice and all, but maybe they should have invested the $30 for their power switch in a second boot drive for $38 instead.

e: I�d also like to know why they chose 1.5 TB 7200.11 Seagate Barracudas. A quick google search turned up lots of nice stories such as this and this.
Those problems were most likely fixed already but still� yikes.

It doesn't matter. Say your web site requires 10PB of online storage (think storing photos or videos, or in this case, online backups). Now, you also need to back that data up. You can back up to tape, but that's not cheap, and doing your restores can become very tricky. If you're dealing with photos, you might have 35,000,000 1.5MB JPEGs per 50TB. At that scale, things like 'find' and 'ls' and 'fsck' just kind of stop working. Depending on how you decided to back up your data to tape, a restore of a single user's images might be easy, but a restore of an entire filesystem nearly impossible, or vice versa. Or a single day's images, etc. And tape isn't that much cheaper than consumer-level SATA disk. So, you decide to just keep multiple copies of all the data online, and you build redundancy and integrity into your application layer. At this point, you don't really care if a single 50TB unit goes offline, just like, at a smaller scale, you don't care if a single 300GB drive in your RAID goes offline.

Conceptually, think of doing something like RAID5 or RAID1, but instead of striping and writing parity across individual disks, or mirroring across individual disks, you have your app layer doing that across multiple storage bricks. We are used to the idea of expecting a single drive to fail; they are used to the idea of expecting a single 50TB unit to fail.

People are comparing this to something like Sun's X4540, but it's kind of misguided since Sun engineered the X4540 to be reliable and perform well as a single unit. These guys don't care because they only need the complete system to be reliable and to perform well, not a single unit.

# ¿ Sep 4, 2009 17:27

frunksock: Feb 21, 2002

moep posted:

That is really the only thing I dislike about OpenSolaris � up�to�date packages are sparse and it requires hours of patching and compiling to get basic stuff working that would require nothing more than one line in the command shell of a linux distribution.

The sad thing is how very much better it is now compared to a few years ago. I won't get into sunfreeware and blastwave and all that, but as bad as it is now, it's come a long way pretty quickly. I got torrentflux-b4rt with transmission up and working on OpenSolaris over the past few days -- it was a ridiculous hackfest to get it working, and it reminded me just far it has yet to go. I'd love to submit my work as a spec file or something upstream to the tfb4rt people, but I ended up making so many sloppy hacks that it's not really submittable.

# ¿ Sep 9, 2009 07:34

frunksock: Feb 21, 2002

roadhead posted:

Very interesting, I assume there is a similar command to do the same thing in FreeBSD running RAID-Z ?

Dunno about FreeBSD, but on Solaris it's "zpool scrub <poolname>" and "zpool scrub -s <poolname>" to stop scrubbing.

# ¿ Sep 23, 2009 17:52

frunksock: Feb 21, 2002

Can we talk cases? I'm going to start a new build, with the intention of running Linux software RAID5 on a H67 system with 4 3.5" disks and possibly a 2.5" for the OS. Here's what I'm looking for in a case:

* Mini-ITX
* As small as possible
* As quiet as possible
* 4 3.5" bays + 1 2.5" bay (ideally, hot-swap bays for the 3.5")
* If the PS is included, must be powerful enough to run a Sandy Bridge CPU
* Having a slimline optical bay would be nice

Here's what I've found so far:

Chenbro ES34169: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811123154
I like the size and layout and hot-swap bays -- not sure how I feel about an external PS though, and I haven't done the math on how comfortably it could handle an i5 and 5 disks.

Fractal Array R2: http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=53545
Pretty, but no optical, no hot-swap, and seems a little larger than I'd like. I like that I can use my own SFX PS.

LinITX A7879: http://linitx.com/viewproduct.php?prodid=12789
Hotswap is nice. I don't think there's an optical bay. Not sure if 200W is enough.

Lian-Li PC-Q08: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811112265
Seems a bit large. No hotswap. I didn't like the one Lian-Li case I owned many years ago.

Is there anything else I should be looking at?

EDIT: Nevermind I guess the Chenbro has a proprietary internal 120W PS. Seems more appropriate for Atom than for SB.

frunksock fucked around with this message at 02:34 on Jan 31, 2011

# ¿ Jan 31, 2011 01:19

frunksock: Feb 21, 2002

Thanks for the replies, guys.

Factory Factory posted:

I have the 180W version of that case with five drives (4 Spinpoint F4s and a small SSD for boot with an i3 540 - the HDDs have to spin up sequentially or I get Vdroop). The 120W version has an internal PSU, but be sure you go with an S variant (2400s, 2100s) if you go that way; I don't think it could handle a 95W TDP part. I have a 120W version running a 45W TDP Sempron WHS box with no problems, as well, so don't underestimate it. Note that the Core i3 2100 series is coming out in a few weeks, so you get all the Sandy Bridge goodness without having to go to an i5, if you want.

Yeah, I'd like whatever I end up with to comfortably handle an i5, 4 7200rpm disks and a boot disk. The box will also be doing transcoding, so I don't want to cut it that close.

movax posted:

I think you should just drop the optical bay requirement; you only are going to install the OS once (hopefully), just leave the case open with a standard SATA DVD-ROM while you install the OS, then remove it and seal the case back up. My Norco has a slimline optical drive slot as well, but I don't really want to pay $50 for a drive I use once every two years.

It's not a requirement, it's a "would be nice." Not as much for OS install as for BIOS / firmware upgrades, and possibly Bluray ripping.

Mr Crucial posted:

I've got one of these. No, there's no optical bay, you have to use some sort of external drive to install the OS. Build quality is good, the hotswap bays work nicely with my 1Tb drives, although screwing the drives into the trays can be a bit finicky. The fan to cool it all is a little noisy for my liking combined with my Atom CPU cooler but nothing too bad. I run Server 2008 R2 with 5 drives and never hit any issues with the power supply.

One thing you can do if you feel sufficiently competent with a drill - there's room down the side of the hot swap bays for an additional 3.5" drive if you drill some holes in the side of the case and mount the drive directly on the case wall. You'd need a splitter to get enough molex adaptors to power 6 drives as the included kit only has enough for 5 drives (the 4 hotswap bays are powered by 2 molex points, and you get a splitter with a SATA power connector for the 2.5" bay).

All in all, a very workmanlike case - no frills, but decent quality nonetheless.

Thanks for the review!

# ¿ Jan 31, 2011 17:46

frunksock: Feb 21, 2002

frunksock fucked around with this message at 20:56 on Jul 2, 2011

# ¿ Jun 19, 2011 21:55

frunksock: Feb 21, 2002

Any recommendations on cases or enclosures for 8+ 3.5" drives? I saw that Silverstone DS380 people on this page have been talking about, which looks really nice, but I might also like something a little less cramped for working in. I don't want a massive tower, but I also don't need one quite that compact.

# ¿ Feb 2, 2014 05:40

frunksock: Feb 21, 2002

Thanks guys. Actually the DS380 looks pretty nice. Does anyone know why there's only one sketchy-looking site I've never heard of that's selling it?

# ¿ Feb 3, 2014 08:58

frunksock: Feb 21, 2002

GokieKS posted:

If it's Sundial Micro you're referring to, they are fine and have been around for a long time - I bought a Cooler Master case from them back during the ATCS line days (before many of that team left to form SilverStone).

And though the DS380 was first shown at Computex last year, it seems like it wasn't until around CES this year that it was actually ready for market, and so it doesn't look like it's made it to retail channels yet.

Yeah, that's the one. Okay, thanks. Has anyone actually received one from them, though? Or are they just listing it before they have actual stock?

# ¿ Feb 3, 2014 10:01

frunksock: Feb 21, 2002

Back to the DS380, is there a ECC Mini-ITX motherboard with 9+ SATA and SAS ports that fits? Or a 8+ port SAS card that's either under 6" long or 2.35" tall? Apparently the E3C224D4I-14S won't fit I'd rather not get one of those Atom boards.

# ¿ Feb 4, 2014 18:13

frunksock: Feb 21, 2002

necrobobsledder posted:

That board is micro ATX. I have never seen an Intel board with 4 DIMM sockets that mini ITX. I saw there's some Avoton boards with CPUs that have slots for 4 SO-DIMMs though. Supermicro has a board that sorta meets all these requirements... but you will be paying out the nose to the point where you'd rather just build a micro ATX system or drop back to mini ITX with an add-on SAS controller.

http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/atom/x10/a1sai-2550f.cfm

GokieKS posted:

Oh, oops, I completely goofed. Yeah, a standard mITX board just really doesn't have enough space to include a built-in HBA. And ASRock also makes a Avoton mITX board with 4 DIMM slots and a ton of extra SATA ports from Marvell SATA controllers (which Silverstone actually specifically recommends for the DS380), and at $370 I guess it's not terrible for what you get, but... it's still Avoton.

frunksock: if I'm reading the DS380 component size restrictions right, you should be able to use a low profile HBA with it. The IBM M1115 that I have here is about 57mm / 2.25 in tall, and I think most of the other common LSI2008 rebrands should be around the same size.

Thanks guys. Yeah, I don't want an Atom. I have no problem with an add-on SAS card. Like I said, it just needs to be 8 port, and under 6" long or 2.35" tall if it's going to work in the DS380. So far none of the ones I've been randomly clicking on on newegg meet those criteria, they're all really close but a little too big. It doesn't help that I don't know the important differences between all the various LSI chipsets. Probably I'll just have to wait until the DS380 is in more hands and I can read some reports on what works.

# ¿ Feb 5, 2014 07:24

frunksock: Feb 21, 2002

Mr Shiny Pants posted:

Someone earlier posted the Asrock Mini ITX board that will fit a Xeon and has 4DIMM slots and a SAS controller. It is the ultimate NAS board but costs 300 Euros and is not available over here in Europe.

Do you mean this one that I posted? It doesn't fit the DS380, at least not with the Silverstone SFX PSU:

https://www.facebook.com/ASRockRack/posts/336285553178293

# ¿ Feb 5, 2014 08:18

frunksock: Feb 21, 2002

Mr Shiny Pants posted:

You sure? That sucks..

Horse's mouth.

# ¿ Feb 5, 2014 08:29

frunksock: Feb 21, 2002

Don Lapre posted:

Will this not fit?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...0140205162347:s

It'll fit, but it's only four ports.

necrobobsledder posted:

I don't think you understand that Bay Trail and Avoton (current-gen) Atoms are much beefier than before and are now basically yesteryear's Celerons and perform somewhere in line with Core 2 Duos from about '09, which is powerful enough to transcode 1080P h.264 high profile movies in realtime. They should handle most NAS + media transcoding + download overload duties for most households just fine. For a business I'd be running a small SAN or keeping crap on Amazon EBS volumes or something until I could afford an onsite SAN.

I don't know anything about Bay Trail but I did dig up SPECint numbers on Avoton before I decided I don't want one. It doesn't fit my needs, unfortunately.

# ¿ Feb 5, 2014 18:22

frunksock: Feb 21, 2002

Don Lapre posted:

Sorry picked the wrong one

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816115100

Cool, thanks, that will easily fit.

# ¿ Feb 6, 2014 05:42

frunksock: Feb 21, 2002

D. Ebdrup posted:

I have mentioned the Asrock C2550D4I before, it has 12 SATA ports (a mix of SATA3Gbps and SATA6Gbps, but single platter drives never exceed ~200MBps and the maximum read or write of even SATA3Gbps is ~370MBps), and it fits 64GB ECC DIMM. Although it's Atom 2.0 aka. Avaton, there's supposedly considerably more horsepower according to some benchmarks, as Avaton is intended for the server market - however, I've yet to see any numbers on cpubenchmark.net, so who knows.

Yeah we were talking about it earlier in the thread. The CPU doesn't fit my needs, otherwise that board would be great. Here's a useful synthetic for comparing it to other processors. It scored 106 on specint rate 2006. See the last slide at https://intel.activeevents.com/sf13/connect/fileDownload/session/C60AC5C04526F97557133399B12DA73D/SF13_SPCS005_101.pdf You can compare with tons of other CPUs at http://spec.org/cpu2006/results/rint2006.html This is a multiprocess benchmark and an 8-core chip, so while it's already seriously losing out to quad Xeons, it will look even worse on single-threaded workloads. I agree it should be fine for a machine dedicated to fileserving and realtime transcoding, though.

I think you meant a single spinning disk wouldn't do more than 200MB/s; most disks have multiple platters. Sorry for the pedantry, but right, I'm not worried about SATA3 vs 6 for spinning disks.

# ¿ Feb 7, 2014 18:46

frunksock: Feb 21, 2002

What's a good 4+ bay external JBOD enclosure? What's best for the external connectivity? I have memories of eSATA being a pain in the rear end. Is USB3 awesome? Thunderbolt? Something else?

# ¿ Aug 17, 2015 04:43

frunksock: Feb 21, 2002

Wow, a lot of you also have an X10SL7. Has anyone else had problems getting a Si3132 to work?

# ¿ Aug 27, 2015 17:15

frunksock: Feb 21, 2002

I need an 8-bay external enclosure (or two 4-bays that don't mind being stacked vertically). I want the disks to appear individually on the host, which is Linux. Any interconnect is fine, but I've had bad luck with eSATA enclosures that use a port multiplier. Ideally, the enclosure(s) would be as small and nondescript as possible (i.e, no blinding blue LEDs). Internal power supply is a bonus. I don't care how pricey it is if it has all that stuff. Does it exist?

# ¿ Dec 24, 2016 01:59

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 13:37

frunksock: Feb 21, 2002

Are all of the name brand 7200rpm non-SMR drives (in the 4-8TB range) mostly the same as far as noise and reliability and performance?

# ¿ Dec 29, 2016 05:47

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