After a NAS server with at least 4 bays. Anyone know anything worth knowing on these things?

Thecus NB5200 is what I have at home, its flawless

thecus n4100

the n4100 gets a little slawed on large data transfers, seems to cap out at about only 30MB/s. you might wanna go up to the 4100+ or the 5-bay series with celerons like eds suggested

Hate to say I told you so

Also I have 2gig of ram in my 5200, at home with my onboard nic going through a cheap netgear gigabit switch, Ill move around 55MB/s on average and bursts up too 75MB/s

told who what now?


I got the n7700 on term's recommendation and it's quite good. with software raid5 across 6 of it's 7 disks it'll do about 160MB/s locally and I can all but max out my gbit lan transferring to/from it

I told jimbo 5200 but he has to go and waste poor trogs database space as if your opinion is BETTER THAN mine

Holy crap they look nice jim, I hadnt seen that model before. Whats the price tag on that?

also what switch and drives are you running to get speeds like that!

hehe jmr

eds: it's about 1500 + drives, about $2500 all up

I'm just running the WD green 1tb drives which vary between 5400 and 7200rpm. the reason the speed is still fairly reasonable is the number of spindles (6 disks in raid5 with the 7th as an online spare)

switch is just a cheapy belkin gbit. note that I said the 160MB/s was local (ssh'd into the thecus and using dd to test). across the gbit lan I'll only push about 100 MB/s due to the network limit and probably s***ty cables and nics. my desktop just has the onboard nforce nic. the thecus is using the e1000 nic driver, so I guess it's a pair of cheap embedded intel-family nics

here's a pic using an iscsi target initiated from my home desktop, to give you a visual:
http://jason.qgl.org/images/n7700_iscsi.jpg

i've played with a drobo lately and it was pretty nice (with the lan adapter) , wouldn't mind a drobo pro

Been using freenas allot lately really easy to setup and just by older bits from the compatibly list and your set. Especially given how cheap perc5i and 6's are pin mod, battery backup and write cache and you laughing with a high capacity. Although I am still a bit new to bsd its not all that hard to figure out.

I am thinking of using daul perc5's in raid5 both with the battery backup and use rsync to running locally every couple of days to copy data from one array to another.

Also Zfs support which is another plus, but soemthing I don't use yet

Currently I am using a promise ns4300 which has been stacking up pretty well, but if I was to buy another pre-built nas then I would opt for the thecus 7700, and raid 6 at least I can afford to lose two drives that way. But the price tag is pretty high and I can build a xeon 3xxx series file server with daul arrays for nearly equal price. This will increase power consumption. However I am thinking of using exsi with smoothwall and freenas side by side. Which would let me get rid of the 4300 and my sempron based smoothwall.

So 7700 would be a first pick for no f***ing about, freenas or even openfiler if your going to build a fileserver. Then there is the consideration raid5 or 6 or even raidz

http://img444.imageshack.us/img444/2671/21233860905a94d21cc4.jpg

http://australia.emc.com/products/series/celerra-gateway-platforms.htm

:D

(well he never specified a budget...)

Plus it doubles as a heater right jase

f*** yeah, who needs fancy water cooling when I have an office with an ambient room temp of -2c

red ...snip

Sif use emc, for san / nas solutions. Beside he did say 4 bays, but given the small increase in cost to go to a 7-8 drive solution is worthwhile.

last edited by HerbalLizard at 11:22:32 29/Jul/09

last edited by HerbalLizard at 11:22:56 29/Jul/09

lol EMC. I'd rather a Thecus.

what's wrong with emc for san/nas, out of interest?

well JMR... everyone seems to be sayin 7700... what you got to say now?

Beside he did say 4 bays

No I think you will find he said "at least" 4 bays.

EMC are plenty good for NAS. Besides, they'll probably buy NetApp eventually anyway. Seems the trend at the moment.

I've managed a few EMC CX3-40's etc and they have been flawless (done flare upgrades etc np at all, cept make sure you stick to the 2 versions at a time rule).

As above +1 for 7700 for decent NAS

Ordered the 7700 with 5 x 1.5terry biters!

Let you know how I get along.

Raid 5 ftw?

depends what you're doing with it, just reliable storage? or do you want it to be fast etc

6 disks in raid5 + one online spare is my recommendation

with your data across 6 spindles, as I mentioned and demonstrated above it's easily capable of maxing out your gbit and then some - the raid5 write hole is essentially rendered a non-issue. so it's reliable and fast

I figured raid5 + one online spare would be more suitable for my home use than all 7 drives in raid6 because raid6 wouldn't offer any useful speed increase (already > gbit) and it would mean all 7 drives are constantly in use. with raid5 and an online spare I still have a second spare, but it's going to be in minimal mode (WD green drives) until a drive in the array actually fails. The only tangible benefit I could see raid6 giving me was that if a second drive failed before parity was rebuilt across the array using the online spare, I would probably lose data.


and you probably don't want to use ZFS cos it's fuze-zfs and is as slow as balls. I tried it to suss it out when I first got it and it was painful, changed to ext3 the next day

Like everything tequilla, Im after it all!!! I figured raid 5 for speed, redundancy and storage!

I thought as much as jim just said, except im only using 5 total drives. For now anyways. It should come at least close to maxing out Gbit network and be redundant and be a massive storage device.

oops yeh I missed the bit where you said you bought 5 disks

what's wrong with emc for san/nas, out of interest?

Nah there's nothing really wrong with them ... I'm just spoilt by my Compellent SANs ( have three of them, Main, onsite DR replica, and offsite DR replica.

Having used EMC,HP,NetApp as well, I'd eat my own s*** before deploying anything but Compellent ( unless there's a very specific requirement that required it, and even then I'd whine and moan about it like a little bitch.

XFS, ZFS or Ext3 ?!?

Whats the short and sweet on all of them? Anyone know? I went ext3 because of what Jim said

and you probably don't want to use ZFS cos it's fuze-zfs and is as slow as balls. I tried it to suss it out when I first got it and it was painful, changed to ext3 the next day

but i dont really know what each is...

'ere ya go:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext3

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xfs

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zfs ** note that zfs on your thecus (or pretty much any linux host) is done via FUSE which has considerable performance implications:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FUSE_%28Linux%29

i had a read of them before posting here but its all greek to me man

Thanks for the quick response btw