Getting Hard Drives out of Computers...

[ddrueding]

I like tinkering with different technologies. Sometimes I even convince some of my more adventurous clients to take the plunge and check them out. My latest obsession has been in getting hard drives out of workstations/clients and consolidated into something fast and redundant.

Like most ill-concieved plans, this has many motivating factors:

Personal: I'd love to get all the drives out of my machines at my house. Especially the ones in the bedrooms and livingrooms. Just stick a mess of storage in the Garage and call it good.

Work: Very often I'm tasked with building an office of super-simple machines. 20 machines that do nothing but data entry/web research/e-mail. The thin-client/Terminal Server thing is OK, but has it's problems. Just getting the drives out of the systems would make them less expensive and more reliable.


So the question is: Should I be researching iSCSI? Fibre-Channel? Something else? Is there a low-cost HBA for either technology out there anywhere?

I know this will take a lot of research, but a good place to start would be much appreciated.

 

[i]

Personal: I'd love to get all the drives out of my machines at my house. Especially the ones in the bedrooms and livingrooms. Just stick a mess of storage in the Garage and call it good.

I did this at home. I'm sure I've posted about it here before too.

The system here on my desk is a 75MHz Pentium. No CPU fan required. The case of the power supply is open inside the system case itself, so with the decent passive airflow I was able to remove the power supply fan. And there is no hard disk. And as a result of all that, there is no noise. It's completely silent -- a genuine 0 dB.

I chose the easy route to make this possible: LTSP. DHCP server reconfiguring aside (not hard), it was pretty much an effortless arrangement to set up.

The server is a dual PII 400 system, with dual cheap and screaming CPU coolers to match, and a pair of jet-aircraft-like Seagate Cheetahs. It lives in my kitchen. Noise in the kitchen is acceptable and anticipated ... noise in my study area is absolutely not.

Running at 1280x1024x32bit, there is a delay with some actions in the GUI, but it's only noticeable to me for a little while after switching over from a "normal" system. Then I don't notice it any more. All the same, I'm considering upgrading to 1000baseT ethernet at some point to see if that improves performance any. Upgrading my operating system would help too I'm sure -- I'm using an antique version of RedHat with an old kernel version.

FPS type gaming is not an option as things stand right now (we'll see after the upgrades happen at some point). Any standard office-type application works fine, as do more simplistic type games of course.

 

[mubs]

ddrueding,

I don't have any answers, but a suggestion: your question is very open-ended. It would help to know the application you have in mind (home, for a business, etc.), the volume of storage, budget, etc.

 

[ddrueding]

Yeah, it is open-ended. Mainly becuase I don't know exactly what I'm up to. But let's start with my home configuration and see where we go from there.


I'm planning on building a very powerful 0dB machine. Using the very low power (35W) Athlon64 2800+ and undervolting it. I also have a passively cooled 9800XT and a passive northbridge cooler. If I can get a passively cooled PSU than I'll be set. If there are no moving parts in the system at all, than I'll be fine surface mounting the hardware to a wall (modern art?) and there is plenty of general airflow about the house.

As this is a high-end machine, remote connections and boot-to-LAN configurations aren't feasible. What I really want is a way to mount drives that are 20+ feet away as local bootable volumes. That is why I attached myself to iSCSI and fibre-channel after some modest research.

I really want this to be a hardware-based solution on the client end. The server-side can be software-based if it doesn't interfere with performance too much. I'd really like performance at least equivalent to my 74GB Raptor.

Cost? As little as possible, but if just the 1 client HBA, the cabling and whatever is required at the server side was under $1000 I'd consider it workable.

 

[Pradeep]

IIRC Ultra 160/320 SCSI is good for 15m. Tho long cables like that don't come cheap. Sounds like you will only be connecting the one machine?

 

[sechs]

So far, we've figured out that "high-end" and "remote storage" don't mix.

Fibre Channel might work. Is there any iSCSI hardware?

 

[ddrueding]

Even though this implementation may only be 1 or 2 machines (totally do-able with SCSI), I like to use my home as a lab for testing technology before I stick it in the field. From what I've read, iSCSI has the ability to mount bootable volumes via a switched ethernet network? Is this correct?

 

[Santilli]

I don't see much of a problem, David, except money. Cables are avaliable,

http://www.granitedigital.com/catalog/pg09_xtcables.htm

and depending on length, depends cost. Still, it's doable.

Just buy a remote RAID box, and go. Of course, to be super fast, you need PCI-X and an LSI controller, single channel should do it. Call Ken at Granite Digital. They might have some sort or remote, cheap, small, mini-tower to store a boot drive in, remote. With current X-15's, I don't see why you couldn't have a small, closet mounted box, with Vantec silent fans, and maybe an Ultimate Hard drive Cooler for each drive, that would be quiet enough so that behind a door, you couldn't hear it.

I just went over your post, and redundant means Raid 1 to me, with maybe 4-8 drives. Sounds like your drive box needs room for expansion.

Do it.

s

 

[ddrueding]

FYI: LVD SCSI has a 12m max length, but using one of these ($60) will double that, 70+ feet would work for most installations. I'm having a hard time finding 12m cables, though. I'm just curious on pricing.

 

[Santilli]

SCSI Vue Gold Diagnostic Cables
for speeds up to 320MB/s (Ultra 3 SCSI)LVD

This cable utilizes the new .8MM Very High Density connector that is being used by Adaptec (39160) and other Ultra SCSI Controller Card and Workstation Manufacturers. Its small size lends itself to a variety of tight fit uses.

(m = male, f = female)

68 Pin .8mm (Very High Density) - to - 68 Pin MicroD (High Density)

4911 68 .8mmVHDm - 68 MicroDm - 3 ft. $159.00
3100 68 .8mmVHDm - 68 MicroDm - 6 ft. $199.00
4200 68 .8mmVHDm - 68 MicroDm - 10 ft. $249.00
3550 68 .8mmVHDm - 68 MicroDm - 15 ft. $299.00
4981 68 .8mmVHDm - 68 MicroDm - 30 ft. $399.00


68 Pin .8mm (Very High Density) - to - 68 Pin .8mm (Very High Density)

8700 68 .8mmVHDm - 68 .8mmVHDm - 3 ft. $179.00
7440 68 .8mmVHDm - 68 .8mmVHDm - 6 ft. $229.00
3501 68 .8mmVHDm - 68 .8mmVHDm - 10 ft. $279.00
2325 68 .8mmVHDm - 68 .8mmVHDm - 15 ft. $339.00
1634 68 .8mmVHDm - 68 .8mmVHDm - 30 ft. $439.00

 

[Santilli]

Well, time to call in Splash. This is more his area...
Anybody have a spare salmon for bait? :mrgrn:

s

 

[ddrueding]

I'm still really interested in iSCSI and somewhat interested in Fibre-channel. Mainly as these work better with high-capacity SATA drives, and (with iSCSI) the cabling can be longer and is cheaper.

 

[Santilli]

Frankly, I don't see much of a point, period.

This Dell P2 400 mhz has no detectable noise. The refrig is louder.
It has a Quantum LM in it, and you can't detect it, 90% of the time, unless defraging or something that is disk intensive.

With adequate RAM, and an OS that doesn't page all the time, I think it's just not cost effective.

Noise wise, hard drives are the least of my worries. CPU fans, power supply fans, and others are the major noise factors.

s

 

[Santilli]

A cheaper, more cool way to go would be water cooled computer stations, and
go for some of the silent computer technology.

Swifttech comes to mind.

Isn't what you are after made by Sun? A central box, with terminals?

s

 

[ddrueding]

I've already gone pretty crazy with the noise reduction, but my house is insanely quiet. My bedroom system currently runs 2 120mm fans @ 5v, and is too loud for me to sleep with it running. I'm at the point where getting any quieter will require the elimination of moving parts, and the thought of a true 0dB system is getting me really....er, nevermind.

But really, I'm justifying this odd pursuit by examining the potential for an office of 20+ light-moderate users. From what I've read this leads me to iSCSI. Any help in that direction?

 

[Santilli]

Controllers:
http://www.attotech.com/epciview.html

http://www.attotech.com/hot.html
The fine print can be scary...

What do Fibrechannel cables run?

s

 

[ddrueding]

Controllers:
http://www.attotech.com/epciview.html

http://www.attotech.com/hot.html
The fine print can be scary...

What do Fibrechannel cables run?

s

Wow, not a single one of those cards are under $1100

I'm not that adventurous...

 

[ddrueding]

Isn't what you are after made by Sun? A central box, with terminals?

If the terminals had high-end 3D accelerator cards and were capable of driving triple-head video solutions that could stream MP3s while playing games and encoding DVDs....yes, that would be fine.

 

[Mercutio]

So what's wrong with an Xterminal or a Windows thin client?

If you aren't doing local processing, these guys are the way to go.

 

[ddrueding]

So what's wrong with an Xterminal or a Windows thin client?

If you aren't doing local processing, these guys are the way to go.

But I am doing local processing. AFAIK, no thin client can do what I mention above.

 

[jtr1962]

If there are no moving parts in the system at all, than I'll be fine surface mounting the hardware to a wall (modern art?) and there is plenty of general airflow about the house.

Bad idea for a variety of reasons. For starters, if you accidentally get any liquids on the boards while they're operating you can probably kiss them goodbye (note that most liquids don't harm circuit boards when they're unpowered-I've cleaned urine off taximeter boards and they've worked fine afterwards). Next problem is EMI. When the board is not mounted in a case it can both receive and emit EMI. Emissions from cell phones may cause erratic operation. Conversely, when the board is operating any wireless devices may not work properly.

Despite being in a somewhat noisier environment than you are, I also can find the noise from PCs to be offensive. I've managed to quiet my system down quite a bit by purchasing a new power supply with a 120 mm variable speed fan, undervolting the processor fan, and disconnecting the case fan. Processor temps usually stay under 40°C. The system is almost inaudible due to background noise except at night, and even then it's not too bad. I may try to modify one of my Pentium MMX boxes to be close to zero dB as one of my next projects. I'll passively cool the PS with larger heatsinks and disconnect the case fan. The large processor heat sink in both of my 200MHz machines doesn't require a fan, so the only noise source will be the hard drive.

 

[Mercutio]

So what's wrong with an Xterminal or a Windows thin client?

If you aren't doing local processing, these guys are the way to go.

But I am doing local processing. AFAIK, no thin client can do what I mention above.

The Window-based guys generally run Windows CE and have ~300MHz CPUs with 64 - 512MB RAM. If you can compile your program for that, they can do things besides be a terminal.

Besides, why do anything on a client if you've got a monster server 50 feet away that's using .04% of its CPU(s)?

 

[ddrueding]

My quiet computing has really become a sick obsession. My system has 2 120mm fans, one built into the PS (that I've replaced with a 5v Panaflo) is actually ducted to draw from my Zalman 7000A with fan removed. the other draws air across the hard drives and blows across my passively cooled 9800XT and 9200SE video cards. I replace all the drives about every 4 months to avoid any increase in sound. There's probably about 5lbs woth of Dynamat in there. I used to have an insulated box made of MDF that I would put my computer into, but I've run into thermal issues. 0dB is all there is left.


I'm not really concerned about the EMI/RFI factors or the enviromental exposure, as my environment won't cause problems.

 

[ddrueding]

So what's wrong with an Xterminal or a Windows thin client?

If you aren't doing local processing, these guys are the way to go.

But I am doing local processing. AFAIK, no thin client can do what I mention above.

The Window-based guys generally run Windows CE and have ~300MHz CPUs with 64 - 512MB RAM. If you can compile your program for that, they can do things besides be a terminal.

Besides, why do anything on a client if you've got a monster server 50 feet away that's using .04% of its CPU(s)?

I'm a gaming nut. If this system can't play DX9 games @ 2048x1536 it won't fly. Triple head is also a requirement.

This is my primary rig, I just want to put the harddrives 20+ feet away.

One of the clients that I would consider this to be a test for use AutoCAD2004 on dual-head workstations running insane resolutions. Definatly a thick-client enviroment.

 

[Mercutio]

My solution for that, in my bedroom, was to do do XGA-over-cat5 (the baluns are around $40 for a set) + a USB hub on a long cable. My "bedroom PC" is on the far side of a wall, in another room, from where I sleep. I can't hear it at all.

 

[ddrueding]

nice thread on SR

 

[Buck]

Interesting thread. It makes me wonder if cmkrnl and KOOLER work together - cmkrnl knowing about StorageReview and its forum as a longtime member, and KOOLER as the entrepreneur. Of course, that's just my paranoid disposition.

 

[ddrueding]

Interesting thread. It makes me wonder if cmkrnl and KOOLER work together - cmkrnl knowing about StorageReview and its forum as a longtime member, and KOOLER as the entrepreneur. Of course, that's just my paranoid disposition.

Doesn't strike me as paranoid...we'll see how closely they're watching the thread...

 

[Santilli]

Well, I like being able to hear my hard drives. In fact, I've learned to tell when some sort of unauthorized activity is going on, by the noise they make. It's not much, but the little writing and seeking that occurs usually gets me running TrendMicro, and more times then not, it's some damn worm, or some sort of PC stuff that I don't want on my system.

I am seriously thinking about switching to silent fans, Swifttech cpu coolers, and seeing if I can get the overall box a bit more silent.

Again, costwise, you can come up with a silent computer less then remoting the drives, at least in my research so far.

s

 

[blakerwry]

I have no problem getting hard drives that are silent (too quiet to hear from a few inches) so I don't see why you would have to remove the hard drives from the system unless you just want the fastest thing on the market like a raptor or cheetah (neither of which are silent).

Maybe you could live with the speed of a 300GB Maxline III with 16MB Cache?

 

[Santilli]

Either play light music through your pc, which if you are gaming, I don't think you can hear anything anyway, or get earplugs when you go to sleep.

s :wink:

 

[The JoJo]

Interesting thread. It makes me wonder if cmkrnl and KOOLER work together - cmkrnl knowing about StorageReview and its forum as a longtime member, and KOOLER as the entrepreneur. Of course, that's just my paranoid disposition.

Long advertisement, from the two of them.....

 

[The JoJo]

Maybe you could live with the speed of a 300GB Maxline III with 16MB Cache?

Or a X15.4 ? With lots of dampening...

Just use one quiet harddrive in the rig, a fast GIGe CSA motherboard, good cabling and put a fileserver somewhere with the "whiners" and an equally good CSA GIGe MB? Like blakerwry said...IF you need lots of space.
Or something like a Samsung SP1604 or it's derivates?

OF course, this is a bit off topic as this doesn't really help you get all the harddrives out, but this is what I might do.

 

[.Nut]

ANYTHING that's associated with Fibre Channel is outrageously overpriced for what it is -- not to mention that it possesses variable compatibility with other vendor's Fibre Channel products. Much of this compatibility problem is intentional so as to force users into certain hardware camps or into one or two vendor's talons, where they can squeeze you as hard as they want.


The gouging that's occurred for several years in the world of Fibre Channel is now beginning to come to an end because iSCSI does away with F-C compatibility problems and it is definitely less expensive than F-C at equivalent functions. iSCSI leverages the very-well-entrenched SCSI command set and Ethernet technologies. All of this dovetails very nicely into "inexpensive" parallel SCSI, Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), and SATA technologies, which are the building blocks for creating IP SANs. Still, iSCSI is not exactly cheap either! But, then again, any sort of physical layer switch hardware, and the like, will never be "cheap" by any stretch. This is sophisticated hardware with plenty of intellectual property licensing costs factored into the final product price.

Even though this implementation may only be 1 or 2 machines (totally do-able with SCSI), I like to use my home as a lab for testing technology before I stick it in the field. From what I've read, iSCSI has the ability to mount bootable volumes via a switched ethernet network? Is this correct

IBM has a product in the works called iBOOT. iBOOT is an iSCSI initiator technology that allows for totally disc-less booting from an iSCSI target. The only problem is that iBOOT has to be supported in your computer's BIOS. Otherwise, many modern Intel-based boxes can do a network boot over ordinary Ethernet via PXE services because it's supported in those BIOSes.

IIRC Ultra 160/320 SCSI is good for 15m. Tho long cables like that don't come cheap. Sounds like you will only be connecting the one machine?

You can currently do this a couple of ways now (going beyond 15 meters in distance):

• One is with a repeater -- this is the cheapest. But, you can only repeat the signal once, because the buffering that occurs in repeaters will add too much delay in the SCSI signal transmission if you repeat the signal too many times, causing a signal time-out situation.
  
• Another solution is to use a SCSI Extender, which use special-purpose transceivers using either CAT5/CAT6 four-pair copper Ethernet cabling or (better) multi-mode fiber-optic cabling. With CAT5/6 you can get 100 meters distance, with fiber optic cabling you can get 2 kilometers distance.

Or a X15.4 ? With lots of dampening...

An X15.3 (or likely the upcoming X15.4) are unusually quiet. The X15.3 is f-a-r quieter than the original X15.1 buzzsaw. The X15.3 is no louder than a modern 7200 RPM IDE hard drive.

 

[ddrueding]

So what company makes (relatively) cheap, reliable, bootable, iSCSI HBAs?

 

[Splash]

So what company makes (relatively) cheap, reliable, bootable, iSCSI HBAs?

At around US$500 each, the least expensive iSCSI HBA is the one from iNTEL. If you expect to get good I/O performance on an IP SAN, you will need hardware-assisted TCP/IP acceleration and the buffering.

http://www.intel.com/network/connectivity/products/iscsi/


Even though iSCSI technology is decidedly less expensive than Fibre-Channel technology, you are still going to spend *plenty* setting up a basic IP SAN -- at least at this time. You will need iSCSI HBAs, an iSCSI switch, and iSCSI storage devices.

The iSCSI HBA (TCP/IP hardware offload accelerator) will likely become integrated into mobo chipsets in coming years -- probably once we finally hit the 10GbE era in earnest, all Ethernet switches may very well support iSCSI as well as "ordinary" 1GbE (and/or 10GbE) network operations, and iSCSI storage devices will likely go down in price steadily as competition, acceptance, and IP SAN implementation takes off. I could see the first two things happening moderately fast (<4 years), but inexpensive IP SAN storage may be a long time coming just because the marketplace will see it as a cash cow.

One thing you can do NOW -- as far as the "inexpensive" IP SAN storage goes -- is that if you already have a Windows server box, you can run DataCore's SAN Melody Lite ($199) iSCSI target software device drivers on that server and it will show up on an IP SAN as a mass storage device if you do a LUN discovery operation. See:

http://www.datacore.com/products/prod_SANmelodyLite.asp



MS's latest iSCSI intiator drivers:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...1a-15d6-4585-b385-befd1319f825&DisplayLang=en

• By the way, I recently realised that iSCSI is a palindrome -- one of those rare words that read the same backward or forward. Examples: RADAR, MADAM, and now... ISCSI.

 

[mubs]

...TCP/IP hardware offload accelerator...

The TOE. Computers are becoming more human - they're sprouting body parts now.