Building Petabytes on a budget

P5-133XL

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I saw this and decided it was interesting and potentially useful enough that it was worth posting a link here.

Petabytes on a budget

BackBlaze is supplying detailed instructions on how to build a 67TB (45 drives using 1.5TB Seagate HD's) server in a custom 4U case for aprox. $8,000 in HW costs.
 

Bozo

Storage? I am Storage!
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WOW!!

I'm not familiar with port multipliers. If five drives are attaced to one, does the operating system see them as one large drive?
 

ddrueding

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The OS sees all the drives, but performance is limited. All drives on the channel have the speed of one connection split amongst them.
 

Stereodude

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That article should be titled, "Slow Petabytes on a Budget". They could have spent a little more money and got much much better performance. But, I suppose for their application it doesn't matter.
 

LunarMist

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My experience with PM has not been good. The controller has to support it and the modes are typical RAID levels implemented in firmware. I suppose some configurations with just the right hardware and OS would work to some degree, but that is a half-assed storage solution with insufficient redundancy.
 

P5-133XL

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Hey folks, this is not a design for a super fast raid setup. It simply shows the ability to have super large storage, relatively inexpensively.

As to slow, it will be no slower than a single drive which is plenty fast for network access or normal file storage.

As to redundancy, I'm sure that it will be dealing with software-based raid rather than HW/FW for cost reasons.
 

P5-133XL

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If someone needs or wants to, the instructions are detailed enough that it would not be hard to modify to produce speed. Just replace the cheap SATA controllers with RAID controllers. Then add more controllers, the more you separate the drives into separate ports, the more total BW and the faster the array will run. If you add enough controllers then you will start running into motherboard bus limitations and you will need to replace the MB with a server MB with multiple independent high speed buses. The basic design will remain the same, but you start adding much higher end HW. You could even do this with SAS (With different port aggregators), if you needed to, but the capacity would go down and costs again would sky rocket.

Do note adding a bunch of high-end raid controllers will drastically add to the cost.

None of this invalidates the original design. Rather, It just shows there is flexibility. The original design has a simplicity and a beauty all in itself. Don't knock it for what it isn't, rather enjoy it (and use it) for what it is.
 

ddrueding

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Something else to keep in mind; I bet that original design is pretty darn quick for STR. Perhaps not using the drives to their full potential, but I bet it could saturate most network links pretty easily.
 

LunarMist

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Will it be large enough for Mercs "data" collection? :drinka:
 

Mercutio

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Will it be large enough for Mercs "data" collection? :drinka:

Yup. I have capacity enough for about 24TB with 100% redundancy at the moment. I'm WAY lagging that in terms of actual data I need to store, and I will until I get around to pulling a bunch of my old stuff off tapes.
 
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