300GB 7200.9 Slooow

[LOST6200]

I was surprisingly desparets for the space last week and requierdo a drive immediately, so I bought a 300GB PATA 7200.9. The drive seemed to be fine in nornmal use and I used it to organize and process 280Gb of files. However, now that it is connected on a FireWire bridge the write performcei s terrible, around 15MB. Writes and reads were both around 60MB/sec on the ATA controller and a normal dirve (DM+10, DM+9, 7K250) achieves ~29 MB/sec. writes on the same bridge (Oxoford 911). If there some known issue with the Seagate drives or anythign to be done? I really don't have much use for a primary drive of only 300GB and it is only a week old. Thanks.

 

[LOST6200]

Oh crap, it is a 7200.8. But why is a 300GB from 2005 so different from the older 400GB 7200.8 dribes from latte November 2004?

 

[Pradeep]

Given the amount of drives you have, perhaps consider building a cheap file server with a ton of internal drive bays? Connected via gigabit ethernet, you may no longer have to play the alphabet shuffle.

 

[LunarMist]

If I knew what I were doing, I would be dangerous. Building fileservers is beyond my emotional capaacity for certain. Of course I probably shoudl have spend the $8K last year to buy a couple of proper external arrays. I guess they are a bit cheapre now. My stystem is so old and there are other probelms, so I was plannign to start over. Now, reading all about teh new CPUs, chipsets etc., I don't know if it is worthwhile. In the meantime I need to works on teh files! And even worse I discovereds that the new 300GB DM+10 does not work with the bridge that was fine for the old DM 16. I have to reoragnzie the drives anyway, so it will be a long week.

 

[Mercutio]

Storage server for Lunar

Goals
1. Must be quiet (for a storage server) and reliable
2. Lunar must be able to manage the machine appropriately on his own
3. Data storage should ideally be redundant and flexible
4. Data storage should be largely internal, to avoid the 16 dozen 1394/USB2 enclosures I'm pretty sure Lunar has now.

What I would suggest is something like this (prices are from Newegg):
Lian Li PC-V2000B - This case has 12 internal 3.5" bays and 6 5.25" slots (i.e. places to install TWO Supermicro 4-in-3 or 5-in-3 enclosures (I'd suggest the 4 bay ones; they're easier to keep cool). In theory, this beast can handle *20* hard drives (although I'm not sure it can keep that many cool). I discard SuperMicro and Chenbro server cases as being too damned loud. - $265

Thermaltake Silent Pure Power W0049 RUD 680W - I've found ThermalTake PSUs to be reliable and reasonably quiet, which is important for something that will be installed in a home, rather than an office. This unit has 10 standard molex and 4 SATA power connectors. - $172

HighPoint ROCKETRAID2220 PCI-X SATA Controller - 8 SATA ports, Online Volume Management, price that is not insane. - $250

Lunar might also consider an older 3Ware PATA controller, if he has an sizeable number of PATA drives.

Gigabyte GA-8IPXDR-EC - This is a Xeon motherboard. PCI-X support isn't exactly easy to come by, otherwise! It supports GBoC, has 4 PCI-X slots and can handle two CPUs (we don't need that support for Lunar's application). Down side? It handles OLD Xeons, so memory I/O is kind of dumpy, and the 533MHz Xeons top out at 3.06GHz - $250

Intel Xeon 2.66GHz 533MHz - A single Prestonia Xeon. 2.66GHz should be plenty of CPU for a machine that probably won't do gobs of processing. 2.66GHz is a decent backup to a primary desktop machine, though. - $190 (OEM CPU + HSF, from Hypermicro.com; 3GHz chips are more like $350)

An alternative to the low-end Xeon is of course the Opteron. That would get you high-end processing and high-end I/O, but it is probably wiser to segregate I/O from processing, so you can use less expensive components that can be switched more frequently as new technology emerges, without having to wait for a vendor to marry that new tech with the I/O devices you have invested in.

RAM - I'd suggest starting with 2GB - $250 for 4x 512MB or 2x1GB modules of some decent brand (he has 6 DIMM slots on the board I've suggested, and can support 12GB of RAM). Again, the storage server probably isn't going to be doing much but acting as a container for a bunch of drives.

Video is onboard. Presumably Lunar already has all the hard disks in the universe already.

Lunar can make do with WinXP Pro (I'm guessing he already has it), or he could step up to Server 2003. Server 2003 would give substantially better disk performance and slightly better disk management for software arrays, but since this will be a "server" for one user, that's probably overkill.

Anyway, the total cost for this beast is about $1400. Probably $1700ish to build the same machine with Opterons.
This is a machine that can sit in a closet, or under a desk, or anyplace else that's fairly out of the way, and just run. Ideally it would be connected to a GBoC switch to a much faster machine (dual core a64s or Opterons, say), that has "limited" local storage (maybe 1TB) but where Lunar can do the work that he does, while maintaining online access to whatever the heck he's keeping on all those drives he has.

 

[DrunkenBastard]

And perhaps a cheap half height/performance LTO-2 drive, in the $2K range, for his backups. Tho Dell has a nice LTO-2 autoloader that can take 16 tapes for around $4K.

 

[LunarMist]

Yikes, no wyou guys are spending al;l my money..