Building a Storage Server Thread

[ddrueding]

Lets just say I've seen quite a few of these (hell, I've been a part of a few) that have gone nowhere. If they had a few patented technologies, or even some performance statistics , then I'd give them a little more interest.

As it is, they are saying all the right things and saying that it's feasible in all markets, and that all they need is interest from lots of people..whatever.

 

[Dïscfärm]

Gary listed some Supermicro cases for Santilli in one of the threads. It would be worthwhile to check your options on these.

Good point. When the time comes to actually start buying, I'll have to re-visit that thread as well.

I believe that was a Supermicro SC942 case for a CPU, a case that can hold NINE 3½ inch hot swap drive bays (which is actually NINE 5¼ inch half-height bays) or a pair of the special Supermicro 5-drive drive racks (as pictured).

It's probably more expensive than a "regular" 9-drive case that is designed for only for housing hard drives. It is also possible to find an older AT mobo form factor server chassis -- something that most people don't care about these days -- for dirt cheap, something with several hundred watts of power supply capacity (hopefully redundant) and 10, 12, or more drive bays. Maybe something that looks like this behemoth:

 

[Buck]

Supermicro has AMD Opteron product in wings

ULTRA LOYAL Intel customer Supermicro appears to be readying a board based on processors from AMD, according to a document from Fermi Labs available on the world wide web.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=22367

 

[iGary]

Looks like the recent eye-popping 14-drive Supermicro SC932T-R760 chassis (convertible between 3-U rack / pedestal configurations) has become available.

That long drive cage and the 760-watt triple redundant power supply help push the price up to an equally eye-popping US$850.

http://www.atacom.com/program/print...RCH_ALL&Item_code=CASR_SUPE_92_03&USER_ID=www




Nonetheless, you could configure it with a single 5.2 TB volume (RAID Level 5) using 400 GB SATA drives (14 drive members = 13 data + 1 parity) , but you would also need to use a PCI-X or PCI Express SAS controller in order to bust through the 2 TB SCSI barrier. Either 64-bit Win2K3 or 64-bit Linux would be the recommended O/S running on a certified Intel EM64T or AMD64 mobo.

http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/3U/932/SC932T-R760.cfm

 

[Mercutio]

$850 seems entirely reasonable for that kind of density.

I just made a single 13-drive machine (one OS drive) with a good old SC720 and a bunch of 7k250s. Damned thing weighs about 90lbs. Took 3 days to build the arrays and transfer the ~1.5TB worth of data to 'em.

I'm doing it all with $50 4-drive SATA cards. I started with a Promise and two adaptec SATA cards but it turned out that none of those three cards would work together in the same PC. The super-generic Sil-based cards I bought work just fine.

Granted, I'm using Windows 2003's RAID and a bunch of bog-standard PCI cards. I'm sure the PCI bus on this poor machine is gasping for air but my next series of upgrades will almost positively include PCIe and some kind of better controller.