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Homemade 16TB NAS - BlackDwarf

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Re: Homemade 16TB NAS - BlackDwarf

#4

Post by jacquesm »

There is something funny in the name here, given that a black dwarf is what results after a star has gone through a melt-down and I think that is a serious risk with that many drives in such a tight enclosure.

He seems to have that factor under control though, 90 watts under load really isn't that bad.

Reminds me of this: http://www.clustercompute.com/ , no longer in service because it got replaced by a single gpu card.

Re: Homemade 16TB NAS - BlackDwarf

#5

Post by ntoshev »

jacquesm wrote: post #4

There is something funny in the name here, given that a black dwarf is what results after a star has gone through a melt-down and I think that is a serious risk with that many drives in such a tight enclosure. He seems to have that factor under control though, 90 watts under load really isn't that bad. Reminds me of this: http://www.clustercompute.com/ , no longer in service because it got replaced by a single gpu ca…

These stars are called white dwarfs.

Re: Homemade 16TB NAS - BlackDwarf

#6

Post by jacquesm »

ntoshev wrote: post #5
jacquesm wrote: post #4

There is something funny in the name here, given that a black dwarf is what results after a star has gone through a melt-down and I think that is a serious risk with that many drives in such a tight enclosure. He seems to have that factor under control though, 90 watts under load really isn't that bad. Reminds me of this: http://www.clustercompute.com/ , no longer in service because it got replaced by a single gpu ca…

These stars are called white dwarfs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_dwarf

I'm aware of what a white dwarf is, black dwarfs do not currently exist (we think) but are definitely a possibility, think of them as the burned out ashes of a white dwarf, which is an intermediary.

For variety there are also red, orange, brown and yellow dwarfs, it's quite a family.

Re: Homemade 16TB NAS - BlackDwarf

#8

Post by StarLite »

Looks nice :D I hope he has better results with Raid5 then me tho. I have reverted back to a dual drive NAS for stability after having raid 5 servers for a long time. Somehow IDE and SATA drives and raid cards don't cut it for me. I have lost my data so freaking often by corrupt arrays it's not fun anymore.

The first server I had used a Promise card (Supertrak SX6000) card (with 4 * 80 GB drives) that gave me nothing but problems (very poor performance and corrupt arays about once every 2 months). It was running on a standard non-server mobo with a decent but standard PSU, so one of the components might have caused problems tho.

The second was running on an Areca ARC-1210 card (with 8*320 Gb drives) on a tyan thunder dualxeon server mobo with an 850Watt Tagan server PSU and was put behind a 2200VA UPS. Even then the array seemed to dropout quite often and I have spend 100's of hours in total (updating drivers/firmware/OS'es, recovering lost data, replacing parts, cables, moving the server etc...) trying to get it to run decently.

Eventually I just sold the whole damn thing and bought me a simple COnceptronic CH3SNAS with 2 1,5TB drives for the cash I sold the old server for. I have ever never had a single problem in the whole year i've had it and am very happy with the purchase. The performance is totally not comparable (600MB/Sec vs 20 MB/Sec), but even the slow NAS is sufficient enough for me (it streams HD movies just fine and my backups aren't TB's big anyways ;) ). Plus the power usage is literally 1/10th, it's very quiet and a lot easier to carry around and take with me if I need to.

Maybe I just fail at fileservers, maybe I just had bad luck with 2 bad cards, but I'm not convinced a simple affordable RAID-5 solution means your data is safe.

But I must admit I wouldn't mind having that self made NAS at my home tho, it looks cool :D Maybe one day i'll try again.... ;)

Re: Homemade 16TB NAS - BlackDwarf

#10

Post by sandGorgon »

StarLite wrote: post #8

Looks nice :D I hope he has better results with Raid5 then me tho. I have reverted back to a dual drive NAS for stability after having raid 5 servers for a long time. Somehow IDE and SATA drives and raid cards don't cut it for me. I have lost my data so freaking often by corrupt arrays it's not fun anymore. The first server I had used a Promise card (Supertrak SX6000) card (with 4 * 80 GB drives) that gave me nothing…

Next time do try ZFS on Fuse (linux userspace filesystem) - I have a 1TB setup and it works quite well.

You could try making a RAIDZ volume and see how it goes.

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