#260846 - 19/07/2005 16:40
External storage recommendation requested.
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veteran
Registered: 08/05/2000
Posts: 1429
Loc: San Francisco, CA
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Hi All,
I need to get an external storage solution. I was considering an Ethernet device, but the premium you have to pay for that seems nuts.
I read some horrible reviews on the Lacie Big Disk series as they say they get very hot with no fan.
Any other recommendations? I'll be connecting via USB 2.0, so FW400/800 isn't really important... Looking for the largest I can get without spending > $300 or so.
- Thanx
- Jon
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#260847 - 19/07/2005 16:47
Re: External storage recommendation requested.
[Re: jbauer]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 25/12/2000
Posts: 16706
Loc: Raleigh, NC US
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You can buy external USB enclosures that can support any IDE device. I'd just grab one of those (Mark would suggest you find one that has an internal power supply so you can use any old power cable and not have a brick; sound advice) and buy whatever hard drive you'd like.
_________________________
Bitt Faulk
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#260848 - 19/07/2005 16:50
Re: External storage recommendation requested.
[Re: wfaulk]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 24/12/2001
Posts: 5528
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An enclosure with an internal PSU is hotter than one with a brick on a leash PSU however.
The LaCie Big Disk stuff is all just striped RAID so if one HD goes then all your data goes with it.
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#260849 - 19/07/2005 16:53
Re: External storage recommendation requested.
[Re: jbauer]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 08/03/2000
Posts: 12341
Loc: Sterling, VA
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Like Bitt said. Then you can get a 400Gb drive for as low as $255. Of course, as far as I've seen it's hard to find a good enclosure for under $45. Maybe I just wasn't looking hard enough, though.
_________________________
Matt
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#260850 - 19/07/2005 16:53
Re: External storage recommendation requested.
[Re: jbauer]
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addict
Registered: 10/01/2001
Posts: 630
Loc: Windsor, Ontario Canada
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I bought this at Best Buy a few days ago. It was plug and play and I'm really happy with it so far...I was able to transfer 55 Gb of music files to it in about 30 mins too.
_________________________
01001010 01101111 01101000 01101110
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#260851 - 19/07/2005 16:56
Re: External storage recommendation requested.
[Re: ineedcolor]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 15/08/2000
Posts: 4859
Loc: New Jersey, USA
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Are there any data integrity issues with external large hard drives? I had an orignal (USB1 era) hard drive enclosure, and I found I could not trust it from problems with the filesystem. I have also heard random reports of data problems, bad files, etc. Can external USB class devices be trusted for long term archiving?
_________________________
Paul Grzelak
200GB with 48MB RAM, Illuminated Buttons and Digital Outputs
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#260852 - 19/07/2005 17:07
Re: External storage recommendation requested.
[Re: jbauer]
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addict
Registered: 29/06/2002
Posts: 531
Loc: Triangle, VA
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I personally have a Linksys NSLU2 and a Seagate 300gig external USB drive. I absolutly love this setup...
_________________________
-D
Modifying and Tweaking is a journey,
not a destination................................
MKIIa : 60gig - 040103286 - Blue - v2 + PCATS tuner
MKIIa : 20gig - 040103260 - Blue - v3a8 + Mark Lord Special Edition Cherry Dock
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#260853 - 19/07/2005 17:33
Re: External storage recommendation requested.
[Re: jbauer]
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veteran
Registered: 21/03/2002
Posts: 1424
Loc: MA but Irish born
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Saw one of these in Best Buy at the weekend http://www.mirra.com/product/index.html where it sells for $400 for 160GB of storage (bigger sizes available). Probably way over kill for what you want but it was an intresting piece of hardwar none the less.
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#260854 - 19/07/2005 17:43
Re: External storage recommendation requested.
[Re: jbauer]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 08/03/2000
Posts: 12341
Loc: Sterling, VA
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_________________________
Matt
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#260855 - 19/07/2005 17:59
Re: External storage recommendation requested.
[Re: pgrzelak]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 29/08/2000
Posts: 14496
Loc: Canada
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Quote:
Are there any data integrity issues with external large hard drives? I had an orignal (USB1 era) hard drive enclosure, and I found I could not trust it from problems with the filesystem. I have also heard random reports of data problems, bad files, etc. Can external USB class devices be trusted for long term archiving?
I have never looked closely at the protocols, but the Linux USB mass storage driver claims that "data integrity" is NOT guaranteed -- implying that there is no CRC feedback to verify error-free transfers to/from the enclosure. Firewire apparently does not have this issue.
Cheers
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#260856 - 19/07/2005 18:02
Re: External storage recommendation requested.
[Re: tman]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 29/08/2000
Posts: 14496
Loc: Canada
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Quote:
An enclosure with an internal PSU is hotter than one with a brick on a leash PSU however.
Huh? They do have internal cooling fans, ya know. Cold as room temperature.
Cheers
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#260857 - 19/07/2005 18:09
Re: External storage recommendation requested.
[Re: mlord]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 10/06/1999
Posts: 5916
Loc: Wivenhoe, Essex, UK
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There is always external SATA. After trialing a single external SATA drive, I now know that my next server will be a fanless mini-itx box with three large fanless external SATA drives and RAID5 (or maybe two drives and mirroring).
_________________________
Remind me to change my signature to something more interesting someday
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#260858 - 19/07/2005 18:25
Re: External storage recommendation requested.
[Re: jbauer]
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member
Registered: 24/10/2000
Posts: 106
Loc: San Jose, CA
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I use a Buffalo Terastation, 1 terabyte, with 4 250 gig hard drives in a RAID-5 config (for an effective 700 gig or so after parity disk and formatting losses. It's network attached and standalone, has a very small physical footprint and is whisper quiet. I've got all my music and videos on it, and then my mythtv box/jukebox mounts it via SMB and serves up the content (plays music/videos locally or streams music to remote boxes).
It serves up via samba/CIFS and appletalk, and has FTP access. I HIGHLY recommend using the FTP access to get your files onto the box, the CIFS write access is abominably slow (even factoring in the inherent slow writes on RAID 5). The box and tech notes claim that it does NFS but that's a bald faced lie, it doesn't do NFS at all. It also has 4 USB ports to hang additional storage off of or to act as a print server for a USB attached printer.
It's not the best of breed, it's got issues... however I got it for around $700 after rebates at Frys, which beats having to pay around $600 for all the parts to build one out of a small linux box and then administer it.
Of course, for work I just built a 2 terabyte NAS box out of an old PC with Ubuntu (server) installed. It's got 6 400 gig hard drives set up as RAID 0 and serves the ~2 terabytes of storage via NFS. We use it as sort of a "sneakernet on 'roids" type of deal for backing up or transferring huge database partitions.
I'm hoping to stumble across a mini enclosure (like the shuttles) with more than 2 drive bays and enough PSU to juice at least 4 IDE drives. I have several outstanding requests from people to build standalone jukeboxes, mythtv servers and NAS boxes but all the ones I've seen only have 2 bays and I don't want to use a full sized case. 6 drive bays would be ideal, that'd let me have a separate boot drive, 4 RAID 5 drives and a pool spare.
-- Gary F.
_________________________
Eeyore, Original Owner -- Mk II 80 Gb, Blue
S/N #090000803
Tigger, 2nd Owner -- Mk IIa, 80 Gb, Blue
S/N #40103789
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#260859 - 19/07/2005 18:40
Re: External storage recommendation requested.
[Re: Foz]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 25/12/2000
Posts: 16706
Loc: Raleigh, NC US
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Quote:
It's not the best of breed, it's got issues
I was actually thinking about getting one of them. Do you have any recommendations for a better similar product?
Quote:
I got it for around $700 after rebates at Frys, which beats having to pay around $600 for all the parts to build one out of a small linux box and then administer it.
I figure that that $100 is definitely worth hot-swap drives. You'd have to spend that much in such enclosures anyway.
_________________________
Bitt Faulk
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#260860 - 19/07/2005 19:18
Re: External storage recommendation requested.
[Re: Foz]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 08/03/2000
Posts: 12341
Loc: Sterling, VA
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Quote:
I'm hoping to stumble across a mini enclosure (like the shuttles) with more than 2 drive bays and enough PSU to juice at least 4 IDE drives.
The Shuttle SN25P (that I'm looking into getting) has space for 4 hard disks, and they fully expect you to be able to put them in there, so the PSU should be sufficient.
_________________________
Matt
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#260861 - 19/07/2005 19:25
Re: External storage recommendation requested.
[Re: wfaulk]
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pooh-bah
Registered: 25/08/2000
Posts: 2413
Loc: NH USA
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I avoided mentioning the Terastation b/c of the poster's <$300 stipulation. I've got two of them at the office. The gigabit ethernet is fantastic, and I think they're by far the price/performance leader if you're not into rolling your own. I use them for daily on-site warm backup and cross-wireless-bridge weekly offsite backups.
I don't use them for live file use, so I can't really comment about speed, but the few times I've needed yesterday's file back it's blinding fast (reads).
They're good looking and very quiet.
-Zeke
_________________________
WWFSMD?
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#260862 - 19/07/2005 19:28
Re: External storage recommendation requested.
[Re: wfaulk]
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member
Registered: 24/10/2000
Posts: 106
Loc: San Jose, CA
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Quote:
Do you have any recommendations for a better similar product?
The impression iNAS (http://www.ajump.com) is a nice box, but a bit pricier. It does NFS properly, but they are also pretty noisy. There's really not a lot of options in the NAS+RAID arena, you can get a lot of single (and sometimes double) drive NAS solutions but just a standalone box with 4+ drives in it isn't very common.
The NSLU2 is a good product as well, but it's basically designed to serve up external USB drives via ethernet and isn't really a standalone NAS appliance. I can unplug my terastation, take it into work and plug it back in without having to cart around a bunch of crap *and* I have all the survivability of a full RAID 5 config. The NSLU2 is a great option for a standalone media server though, it's pretty hackable (and runs linux).
My complaints about the terastation might be considered nitpicky, but here's what they are:
- can't configure the email alerter to use a secure smtp gateway (alternate port or password protected remailer)
- SLOW network access via CIFS. Plenty fast enough to stream from it, but painfully slow when you're transferring ~200 gig of music and video data to load it up initially.
- high traffic CIFS transfers (such when initially loading it) are pretty susceptible to I/O errors. I finally just gave up and loaded it via FTP.
- no rsync access
- no NFS, even though the product specs claim it (only on the 1 TB, others don't even claim it)
- no large file support (individual files > 2 gig are truncated silently)
- the ntp client has to use IP addresses, won't resolve hostnames (horks round robin NTP server schemes)
- can't upgrade the firmware from linux, the upgrader is a windows executable. Might work with cedega, I just brought it into work and had a coworker upgrade it (I use linux at work too, heh).
- no ssh access, can't hack it without soldering in a serial port and doing some serious voodoo.
- the tech support guys I talked to weren't real friendly (I was going to say they were dicks but I figured that'd be kinda harsh).
- The drives are a PITA to replace (definitely not hot swappable due to the sheer amount of disassembly required).
Some of the things I really appreciate about it:
- simple to administer via the web interface
- basically one-button config for raid 0, raid 1, or raid 5 (or even raid 0+1 with 2 disks in 2 arrays). Can also simply serve up 4 separate JOBD shares.
- almost completely silent
- quite small
- trivial to set up SMB or Apple shares, trivial to set up print services
- pretty damned cheap for a lot of storage. I can get a full terabyte out of it if I went with just spanning/RAID 0
- runs linux (always a bonus). Even though it's a crippled, unaccessible and feature deficient install of linux.
- really easy to just plug in additional USB drives for extra storage in a pinch. I don't know if you can RAID those external drives but if you can that'd give you the ability to hot swap.
-- Gary F.
_________________________
Eeyore, Original Owner -- Mk II 80 Gb, Blue
S/N #090000803
Tigger, 2nd Owner -- Mk IIa, 80 Gb, Blue
S/N #40103789
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#260863 - 19/07/2005 19:32
Re: External storage recommendation requested.
[Re: Dignan]
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member
Registered: 24/10/2000
Posts: 106
Loc: San Jose, CA
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Oh that's tasty... that'd make a great media box. Any idea of the street price for that?
-- Gary F.
_________________________
Eeyore, Original Owner -- Mk II 80 Gb, Blue
S/N #090000803
Tigger, 2nd Owner -- Mk IIa, 80 Gb, Blue
S/N #40103789
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#260864 - 19/07/2005 20:10
Re: External storage recommendation requested.
[Re: mlord]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 24/12/2001
Posts: 5528
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Quote:
Huh? They do have internal cooling fans, ya know. Cold as room temperature.
Even the ones with a fan inside have hot spots because they are usually badly designed because they're trying to wedge everything into the smallest case as possible.
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#260865 - 19/07/2005 20:15
Re: External storage recommendation requested.
[Re: Foz]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 24/12/2001
Posts: 5528
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Quote:
no ssh access, can't hack it without soldering in a serial port and doing some serious voodoo.
You don't need to do the serial port mod any more. You can create a custom firmware image to give you SSH access.
Quote:
the tech support guys I talked to weren't real friendly (I was going to say they were dicks but I figured that'd be kinda harsh).
They're a bit crap on GPL compliance and their technical staff are really bad about it. If you want the GPL source then you have to send them $20 and a SAE. You get a CD back with the tarballs that are requires to build the specified version. New version? Another $20.
Quote:
The drives are a PITA to replace (definitely not hot swappable due to the sheer amount of disassembly required).
Yeah. It's a bit annoying but it's not too bad. Just tedious to do all the little screws.
Quote:
runs linux (always a bonus). Even though it's a crippled, unaccessible and feature deficient install of linux.
You can get the source tarball and build another kernel but it's a bit risky to change. The bootloader doesn't seem to be that easy to use and there is only one kernel stored in the flash so if you screw it up then it's a PITA to fix. You'll need a JTAG adapter if so.
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#260866 - 19/07/2005 20:35
Re: External storage recommendation requested.
[Re: Foz]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 08/03/2000
Posts: 12341
Loc: Sterling, VA
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Quote:
Oh that's tasty... that'd make a great media box. Any idea of the street price for that?
-- Gary F.
Well, Newegg has it for $375, and that appears to be about as low as you can get it anyway.
_________________________
Matt
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#260867 - 19/07/2005 21:14
Re: External storage recommendation requested.
[Re: tman]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 29/08/2000
Posts: 14496
Loc: Canada
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Quote:
Even the ones with a fan inside have hot spots because they are usually badly designed because they're trying to wedge everything into the smallest case as possible.
Yet another reason to get one with a built-in PSU: they seem to only be available in the 5.25" drive bay size, which leaves lots of free space around a 3.5" desktop harddrive.
The HD-only ones with external PSUs can be much more cramped.
Cheers
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#260868 - 24/07/2005 22:43
Re: External storage recommendation requested.
[Re: mlord]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 30/04/2000
Posts: 3810
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As I discussed in a different thread, I'm about to need a whole lot of home storage for Apple Lossless or FLAC files, so I'm looking at getting some kind of home RAID-5 box. I probably need ~600GB capacity, after formatting and whatnot. The Shuttle XPC solution, at least according to GamePC, only supports three hard drives, but they're probably reserving a slot for an optical drive. If you configure the system with four 250GB Maxtors and no optical drive, the price comes out to $2000, assuming you low-ball the graphics card. Perhaps more attractive are the standalone NAS boxes. The two interesting choices, at least that I've been able to find are the Buffalo TeraStation and the Infrant ReadyNAS 600. The former comes fully configured for $1000, but people have many complaints. It doesn't support NFS, among other things. The ReadyNAS box costs $1400 with disks, but you can buy it bare-bones for $600 and add the disks yourself (probably another $500). The NAS boxes seem to beat out the Firewire RAID controllers. You pay more money than the NAS solutions (assuming you want RAID 5), and you seem to get less flexibility. Thoughts?
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#260869 - 25/07/2005 02:07
Re: External storage recommendation requested.
[Re: DWallach]
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old hand
Registered: 15/02/2002
Posts: 1049
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Well, here's my $.02.
You don't need very much processor power. If all you're using it for is to store music, you don't need much I/O throughput either! Even when you put your music on the server, the bottleneck is likely the encryption anyhow. So, forget about trying to make a high performance file server. It's just not necessary and you'll pay a premium for it.
I bought 3 320GB Western Digital drives from newegg for $135 each (after rebate). I use an old Pentium III machine and just put the latest Debian (on this group's recommendation), software RAID5 and Samba. I have 583GB of storage that I can drag&drop from Windoze. Its a big ugly machine, but it sits in a closet on a UPS and I never see it.
This whole thing took about an hour and a half to get going. I think that anybody who can use an empeg can get this going with an old computer they or someone they know have laying around. I just can't see spending the extra money on a prebuilt system like these NAS systems. I guess a Shuttle machine would look better, but who cares? Besides, cramming 3 disks in a small case will shorten their life because they will be right next to each other and run hotter.
My GF and I both use this thing all the time. We play files in Windows using Winamp at the same time. I've simultaneously uploaded new music to the server, synchronized my empeg, and had 2 computers playing music in Winamp (via Samba) and it has never lagged out. This is a measly P3-550Mhz.
I'm guessing that you have an old machine laying around that will do the trick. Stick it in a closet with an ethernet cable and forget about it. Before upgrading, I had 2 250GB drives in a software RAID0 configuration. I wanted the redundancy of RAID5 so I upgraded. The machine had run for over 400 days without a reboot or any attention whatsoever. The only reason it wasn't 600+ days is that I moved and needed to shut it off.
Spend the money you save on another disk, or on 100GB drives for your empeg!
FWIW,
Jim
Edited by TigerJimmy (25/07/2005 02:23)
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#260870 - 25/07/2005 20:49
Re: External storage recommendation requested.
[Re: TigerJimmy]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 30/04/2000
Posts: 3810
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The only "spare" machines I've got are some crusty beige-box PIII-500MHz's at the office, where one by one they've been failing and we've been scavenging parts to keep them going. That's not a good starting point for a RAID box...
Instead, I've decided to go with the Infrant ReadyNAS solution. For what it's worth, there's an AVS forum thread where they are organizing a "power buy" which will apparently get Infrant's next-generation " X-RAID" technology that will apparently be a standard feature in their products next month. The gist is that you can incrementally buy disks, plug them in, and their RAID controller does all the work.
The price on the power buy wasn't posted on AVS, but it's supposed to be posted on a private forum on Infrant's chat forum. As soon as I have numbers, I'll post them here for anybody else who may be interested.
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#260871 - 25/07/2005 20:58
Re: External storage recommendation requested.
[Re: DWallach]
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old hand
Registered: 15/02/2002
Posts: 1049
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Well, that is very nice indeed. I'd love to know what the numbers turn out to be. A friend of mine would like to get one.
Thanks,
Jim
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#260872 - 25/07/2005 21:52
Re: External storage recommendation requested.
[Re: TigerJimmy]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 30/04/2000
Posts: 3810
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Well, I'm now "in" the private forum, but they haven't posted any pricing data. What is clear is that you need to get "in" on the deal by Wednesday, and orders based on the deal need to be in by Friday. They may or may not post the prices before Wednesday. What you get, for what it's worth, is to be one of the first adopters of the sequel to the ReadyNAS 600. You get a "free" upgrade to 256MB of RAM and can pay for a further upgrade to 512MB. Likewise, you can buy the system bare or pre-populated with hard drives.
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#260873 - 26/07/2005 02:28
Re: External storage recommendation requested.
[Re: DWallach]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 08/06/1999
Posts: 7868
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Quote:
The gist is that you can incrementally buy disks, plug them in, and their RAID controller does all the work.
This is one big reason I want to get a decent hardware RAID controller one day for my server. I much prefer a hardware card that says "capacity expansion" as a feature with a minor footnote about backups, compared to the Linux RAID warnings of "it is very likely that there are serious bugs that will destroy your data, possibly even on disks not related directly to the array you are re-configuring."
More info on that NAS box is here, including some interesting shots of the internals.
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#260874 - 26/07/2005 12:03
Re: External storage recommendation requested.
[Re: drakino]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 25/12/2000
Posts: 16706
Loc: Raleigh, NC US
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Well, you could install Solaris x86 instead. I've never had any (non-idiot-initiated) problems with their software RAID, including expanding filesystems.
_________________________
Bitt Faulk
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#260875 - 26/07/2005 12:07
Re: External storage recommendation requested.
[Re: DWallach]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 25/12/2000
Posts: 16706
Loc: Raleigh, NC US
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Looks like their ReadyNAS 1000 actually has hot-swap disks. Of course, it's significantly more expensive. I keep bait-and-switching myself.
_________________________
Bitt Faulk
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#260876 - 26/07/2005 12:13
Re: External storage recommendation requested.
[Re: wfaulk]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 30/04/2000
Posts: 3810
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Hot-swap disks are clearly important in a commecial environment, but for the home, I think I can tollerate the downtime once every N years when a disk fails and I have to take the thing apart. Still, that Buffalo thing has something like 40 screws you need to take out before you get a disk out.
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#260877 - 03/08/2005 15:25
Re: External storage recommendation requested.
[Re: TigerJimmy]
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pooh-bah
Registered: 06/04/2005
Posts: 2026
Loc: Seattle transplant
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#260878 - 05/08/2005 13:59
Re: External storage recommendation requested.
[Re: Robotic]
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pooh-bah
Registered: 25/08/2000
Posts: 2413
Loc: NH USA
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Robotic-
What kernel do you have running (or rather what installs by default w/Sarge). I've also got an old PIII box, and I want to use SATA (better airflow), but that seems to be (better) supported with the 2.6 kernel. Before I pony up for drives & the controller I wanted to check. Thanks.
-Zeke
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#260879 - 05/08/2005 16:04
Re: External storage recommendation requested.
[Re: Ezekiel]
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pooh-bah
Registered: 06/04/2005
Posts: 2026
Loc: Seattle transplant
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Quote:
Robotic-
What kernel ...?
When presented with the selection of kernels to load, I chose 2.6 a few times, but it always hung during boot up. It took me a while before I realized the installer was 'recommending' 2.4 to me, so that's what's on there.
Your machine sounds more like TigerJimmy's (mine's weaker)- I'm not sure what kernel he's running, but I am sure he'll be happy to tell you!
Oh- and I'm running straight off of the motherboard- no controller card. But I guess you'd have to go that route if you wanted SATA.
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#260880 - 05/08/2005 17:08
Re: External storage recommendation requested.
[Re: Robotic]
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pooh-bah
Registered: 25/08/2000
Posts: 2413
Loc: NH USA
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Thanks. I've installed Linux few times, none recently so I don't want to go out and get hardware w/o checking if it'll work first. I may forget the SATA, especially if I can root out a 133 PATA controller which I think I might have in the compu-junk crate (freebie with a drive a while back).
-Zeke
_________________________
WWFSMD?
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#260881 - 19/08/2005 13:08
Re: External storage recommendation requested.
[Re: DWallach]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 30/04/2000
Posts: 3810
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My Infrant NAS box is finally here and I'm pushing all of my data to it as we speak. The HTML configuration gizmo is pretty good, and the manual is great, so far as it goes. So far, my only real concerns are:
- They support per-user shares (i.e., \\YourServer\User1), but only under SMB. You can't see those shares via NFS and you can't really even configure those shares for things like when snapshots happen. As a result, I'm keeping the per-user authentication, but I'll be storing everything in a big, central share that I can mount once and be done with.
- They have a magic "media" share that is used for UPnP, SlimServer, and other such tasks. My MP3 collection is on its way over there. More tomorrow on how well it works. On their chat board, it seems a lot of people are trying to integrate with these various network video playing gizmos (e.g., the Roku HD1000). The consensus seems to be that you can get these boxes to work, but that they all suck in one way or another. There doesn't appear to yet exist a category killer for these things.
- I plugged my USB printer (an HP Deskjet 970Cxi) in and it was recognized and properly exported. However, any jobs I send to it are silently gobbled up and ignored. Hopefully they've got some kind of workaround.
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#260882 - 19/08/2005 15:45
Re: External storage recommendation requested.
[Re: DWallach]
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member
Registered: 24/10/2000
Posts: 106
Loc: San Jose, CA
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I finally got rid of my Terastation, and built my own NAS box. Frys had fully complete sempron minitower systems on sale for $170, so I bought one, put 3 400 gig hard drives in it, built them as a raid 5 array and exported them to my network via NFS and samba. As a bonus, I moved my streaming music server and my mysql database to the same box and radically simplified my HTPC which was running all of that previously.
-- Gary F.
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Eeyore, Original Owner -- Mk II 80 Gb, Blue
S/N #090000803
Tigger, 2nd Owner -- Mk IIa, 80 Gb, Blue
S/N #40103789
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#260883 - 22/08/2005 14:56
Re: External storage recommendation requested.
[Re: Robotic]
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pooh-bah
Registered: 06/04/2005
Posts: 2026
Loc: Seattle transplant
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Yee-haw!  Finally got all the ducks in a row and the install (the last of *several* attempts) went extremely smoothly- I guess practice makes perfect! Big THANK YOU to TigerJimmy for expert guidance! I now have 'gobsOspace' running happily- unfortunately, the newer machine got jealous of the attention and the 80GB drive that is currently holding all of my gold is threatening me with problems. When the 80GB drive is not acting up, I can transfer about 50MB/min to the Debian machine. Total ca$h invested <$300 (including new router!) The basic setup is outlined in my above post- further additions/lessons: - Netgear router (on sale! $30 no rebate! Woot! Network Empeg access!) - PCI NIC -old ISA card was a no-go for Linux (on sale! $10 no rebate! Woot!) - motherboard video and the Debian installer don't get along- had to go back to the PCI video card that was in there before. - Next step: UPS - Yet to be resolved: Debian is continually accessing the drives- even when no data is being transferred. With Jim's help we determined that SWAP was not involved. Does anyone have an idea of what could be causing this? I would think that the drives should spin down if nothing is going on... 
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10101311 (20GB- backup empeg)
10101466 (2x60GB, Eutronix/GreenLights Blue) (Stolen!)
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#260884 - 22/08/2005 15:10
Re: External storage recommendation requested.
[Re: Robotic]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 13/07/2000
Posts: 4180
Loc: Cambridge, England
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Quote:
- Yet to be resolved: Debian is continually accessing the drives- even when no data is being transferred. With Jim's help we determined that SWAP was not involved. Does anyone have an idea of what could be causing this?
I would think that the drives should spin down if nothing is going on...
Does /etc/fstab list "noatime" in your mount options? If not, you'll want to change "defaults" to "defaults,noatime" against all your real filesystems.
Peter
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#260885 - 22/08/2005 16:25
Re: External storage recommendation requested.
[Re: DWallach]
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new poster
Registered: 29/12/2001
Posts: 6
Loc: CA, USA
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In the end, how much cheaper was the X-Raid via the powerbuy? Want to determine whether it's worth holding off until the next one, or jump on it now.
Thanks,
- Gary
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#260886 - 22/08/2005 16:39
Re: External storage recommendation requested.
[Re: peter]
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pooh-bah
Registered: 06/04/2005
Posts: 2026
Loc: Seattle transplant
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Quote:
Does /etc/fstab list "noatime" in your mount options? If not, you'll want to change "defaults" to "defaults,noatime" against all your real filesystems.
Peter
Thanks for the quick reply, Peter!
I'll check tonight. Well, I'll *figure out* how to check tonight... still a steep learning curve here wrt linux/unix shell prompts.
_________________________
10101311 (20GB- backup empeg)
10101466 (2x60GB, Eutronix/GreenLights Blue) (Stolen!)
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#260887 - 22/08/2005 16:53
Re: External storage recommendation requested.
[Re: Robotic]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 19/01/2002
Posts: 3584
Loc: Columbus, OH
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To display the contents of the file, at the prompt, just type "cat /etc/fstab".
If it needs editing, then "vi /etc/fstab"
hit "a" to enter insert mode, then make your changes.
hit "esc" to exit insert mode, then type ":wq" to save and exit.
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~ John
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#260888 - 22/08/2005 17:02
Re: External storage recommendation requested.
[Re: JBjorgen]
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pooh-bah
Registered: 06/04/2005
Posts: 2026
Loc: Seattle transplant
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Quote:
To display the contents of the file...
Wonderful! Thanks!
_________________________
10101311 (20GB- backup empeg)
10101466 (2x60GB, Eutronix/GreenLights Blue) (Stolen!)
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#260889 - 22/08/2005 19:24
Re: External storage recommendation requested.
[Re: GarySh]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 30/04/2000
Posts: 3810
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Quote:
In the end, how much cheaper was the X-Raid via the powerbuy? Want to determine whether it's worth holding off until the next one, or jump on it now.
If you buy a diskless XRAID and then buy separate disks at street prices, then you're pretty close to the PowerBuy price. The big savings came on the disks. Normally, they charge a premium to ship you a system that's ready to go, out of the box. Do-it-yourself installation is reasonably painless, so if you want it now, that's how I'd do it.
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#260890 - 23/08/2005 18:43
Re: External storage recommendation requested.
[Re: JBjorgen]
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pooh-bah
Registered: 06/04/2005
Posts: 2026
Loc: Seattle transplant
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Thanks for the lesson!
I managed to easily edit the file and added the ",noatime" behind "defaults".
Wasn't quite sure what was meant by 'real' filesystems, but I tried various combinations, including everything except swap.
Also didn't know whether to expect the changes to take immediate effect or whether a reboot was needed.
No matter- tested everything and did not get a quiet 'disk access' LED.
Did I miss something? Might there be something else I could check on?
- really appreciate the help, guys!
Say, if I get a hang of this Linux stuff, these home-grown NAS systems could be fun to build for friends!
Edit:
Hmm, found this disk spin-down primer that I'll have to read this week.
I guess it's normal for the disks to be spinning all the time with Linux. Weird.
Looks like noflushd is a strong option for me.
Anyone want to argue in favor of disks spinning all day and night?
Edited by Robotic (24/08/2005 15:49)
_________________________
10101311 (20GB- backup empeg)
10101466 (2x60GB, Eutronix/GreenLights Blue) (Stolen!)
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#260891 - 25/08/2005 19:05
Re: External storage recommendation requested.
[Re: Robotic]
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pooh-bah
Registered: 06/04/2005
Posts: 2026
Loc: Seattle transplant
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One last update for my homebrew NAS-
The drive issue (constant accessing) magically disappeared last night after a message popped up relating the completion of the RAID5 sync following the OS install. Go figure- it was working on something the whole time.
However, trying to install the drive spin-down package failed and pointed to problems with my 'locales' that I'll attack soon.
Happiness ensues! 
and- since the RAID5 sync finished the transfer speed has nearly doubled to ~90MB/min!
Edited by Robotic (26/08/2005 14:19)
_________________________
10101311 (20GB- backup empeg)
10101466 (2x60GB, Eutronix/GreenLights Blue) (Stolen!)
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#260892 - 16/11/2005 22:50
Re: External storage recommendation requested.
[Re: DWallach]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 25/12/2000
Posts: 16706
Loc: Raleigh, NC US
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Got any more thoughts on your NAS?
_________________________
Bitt Faulk
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#260893 - 07/06/2006 13:39
Re: External storage recommendation requested.
[Re: Robotic]
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pooh-bah
Registered: 06/04/2005
Posts: 2026
Loc: Seattle transplant
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Dredging up an old thread because a thought popped into my head.
(the rhyme is totally unintended)
I was just thinking about booting up Linux from a USB jump drive.
If the BIOS allows such a thing, would it be possible to forego a CD drive on a home-built NAS and use the standard terminals for 4 HDs instead of what I've done (3HDs+1CD)?
Moot point for my particular case- the BIOS does not support USB boot. That and I'm not gonna muck about fixing something that's not broke.
One can put all the OS and supporting stuff on a cheap USB flash drive, no? Umm- ok Swap on the flash would be a no-no, but otherwise...
Just thinking to myself about the implications of flash memory-based OS.
_________________________
10101311 (20GB- backup empeg)
10101466 (2x60GB, Eutronix/GreenLights Blue) (Stolen!)
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#260894 - 07/06/2006 14:21
Re: External storage recommendation requested.
[Re: wfaulk]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 30/04/2000
Posts: 3810
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While we've resurrected this thread... My Infrant X6 is now some nine months old and humming along nicely. Actually, it's humming noticably louder than the day I bought it (the fan now runs at 4300rpm rather than its original 3700-3900rpm) and Infrant is sending me a replacement fan, under warranty, to see if that addresses the problem. I have "rev A" box, and they've since gone to a completely different fan structure in the newer "rev B" boxes, although there's still quite a bit of agitation on the Infrant chat board, particularly with the "rev B" boxes. Still, it's working like a champ, now happily storing my entire CD collection as Apple Lossless. With the latest SlimServer software, it even does the transcoding to WAV to support my SqueezeBox. Performance was marginal when I was using 100Mbit Ethernet and no battery backup. Notably, it was unable to deal with capturing video from my video camera through iMovie (DV video is something like 25Mbits). Now I've got GigE and battery backup and the performance is quite snappy. iMovie is now entirely happy to have all of its data on the file server.
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#260895 - 07/06/2006 15:30
Re: External storage recommendation requested.
[Re: Robotic]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 29/08/2000
Posts: 14496
Loc: Canada
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Quote:
One can put all the OS and supporting stuff on a cheap USB flash drive, no? Umm- ok Swap on the flash would be a no-no, but otherwise...
Just thinking to myself about the implications of flash memory-based OS.
This is done all of the time. Just (1) no swap on flash, and (2) no filesystems mounted permanently R/W on flash either (a mounted f/s results in quite regular updates on the fly, which isn't great for the flash. Or perhaps laptop-mode would help with this instead).
Cheers
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