Supermicro deal on Ebay

[timwhit]

Though from what I've read, forecasts say that drives won't be "reasonable" again until probably 2013.

That sucks, I will definitely need more drives before that.

 

[Mercutio]

FreeNAS RAIDZ performance is definitely bound up by RAM. With a total of 20GB RAM, I'm seeing 130MB/sec writes over NFS with dual gigabit. This might be of some interest to folks who get here from Google, given my previous post on the matter.

 

[Chewy509]

BD rips, at 5 - 15GB per title, are pretty rough on available storage.

I've been thinking about setting up a home DLNA server with all my media on it, and after quickly tallying the storage requirements of needing everything to be kept in MPEG2, basically put it aside for now. (I did think about using one of the DLNA servers that can transcode on the fly, but that meant leaving the low-wattage setup into something with more horsepower, and the running cost is something that I have to keep in mind as well ).

PS. I was considering either a Atom or AMD Fusion setup running either Linux or Solaris...

 

[Mercutio]

A dual core Atom can transcode h.264 in real time, at least a single stream.

 

[CougTek]

When drives get reasonable again, I'll buy an Intel RES2SV240 ($200) and stick it in a secondary chassis.

I'm confused. On Intel's product page is written :

Eight SFF8087 SAS/SATA connectors for attaching up to 24 targets or initiators

When I look at the card, I see only six. NewEgg says six too.

 

[Mercutio]

Well, the SFF8087 supports four drives per cable and 4 x 6 = 24 so I'm going with math fail on Intel's part.

 

[ddrueding]

FreeNAS RAIDZ performance is definitely bound up by RAM. With a total of 20GB RAM, I'm seeing 130MB/sec writes over NFS with dual gigabit. This might be of some interest to folks who get here from Google, given my previous post on the matter.

It seems MS Server 2k8 is also happy using all the RAM it has as cache. Even though the RAID5 array I'm writing to is only capable of 35MB/s, the transfer goes at 117MB/s up to the biggest files I have kicking around (~30GB). The server has 32GB of RAM and GbE.

 

[Mercutio]

That's something I'd really expect to see out of a decent file server.

 

[Handruin]

That's really good to hear. Maybe I'll consider changing my NAS over to a windows product vs Linux if it also offers the caching you're seeing. I have a few licenses kicking around in my MSDN that I can test with.

When I tried the earlier version of windows storage server, I didn't have good results with the performance. I don't know if this was a limitation of the NIC under windows or some other reason, but I was less than impressed. Maybe the newer Windows 2008R2 Storage Server offers better performance.

 

[Mercutio]

Did you have a Windows Server at the time with an ungodly amount of RAM?

 

[MaxBurn]

I didn't even have an idea GbE went that high for real world stuff. Theoretical is what 125MB/s? This is a regular windows share we are talking about?

 

[ddrueding]

This is 2008R2 Standard, with the "File Server" and "Indexing" roles added. I plan to also make it an iSCSI target for more VMWare foolery.

Edit: If that caching works with the VMs it could finally get me off my SSD DAS thing.

 

[Handruin]

Did you have a Windows Server at the time with an ungodly amount of RAM?

No, only 6GB. I don't know how much is needed before a reasonable amount of caching can take affect.

I didn't even have an idea GbE went that high for real world stuff. Theoretical is what 125MB/s? This is a regular windows share we are talking about?

I've seen rates getting up close to the theoretical max (111MB/sec) in my own NAS.

This is 2008R2 Standard, with the "File Server" and "Indexing" roles added. I plan to also make it an iSCSI target for more VMWare foolery.

Edit: If that caching works with the VMs it could finally get me off my SSD DAS thing.

Would it help if you used a dedicated switch and trunked four GigE links to a quad-port nic on both ends? Or, if you can spring for it, a single 10Gb adapter...

Does this mean you are going to forgo using that VMWare storage appliance?

 

[ddrueding]

No, only 6GB. I don't know how much is needed before a reasonable amount of caching can take affect.

That should be enough for smaller burst transfers (2GB+? How much free RAM does the machine typically have?)

I've seen rates getting up close to the theoretical max (111MB/sec) in my own NAS.

I've seen Win7 report bursts up to 127MB/s, but I do not trust those numbers too much.

Would it help if you used a dedicated switch and trunked four GigE links to a quad-port nic on both ends? Or, if you can spring for it, a single 10Gb adapter...

I am not having good luck with trunked GbE lines, performance is not always there. 10Gb is getting reasonable-ish, except for the switches. Might just go direct to the VM machines.

Does this mean you are going to forgo using that VMWare storage appliance?

Yup. Expensive for what it is, and ties up the whole machine. This way I can add other storage loads (large but not intensive) to the same box.