41–46 of 46 posts
Well, he's 1/10 of the way to filling it already. (The video project made while building the NAS is 1.5TB) Good design, not often a NAS actually looks great.
I just bought one of these http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B001E03444/ and swap out the drives as I need them. + two Fractal 120mm fans (incredibly quiet yet powerful, highly recommended) from the sides to keep the heat away. I chose that instead of building a similar frame, since a frame for 25 drives (that's what I have :-) ) would need some serious additional cooling and power, whereas the swapping solution doesn't.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not use the Raid Edition drives if you're at it? Supposedly better mtbf, longer warranty, and the to-me-unquantifiably-better TLER feature.
TLER is well worth the 50% premium, in many cases. With desktop firmware, my experience has been that fully half the time when a disk fails, it doesn't properly fail, it retries forever. Linux MD and 3ware hardware raid (the only hardware raid I tried) both hang up waiting for the drive to fail. (the 3ware keeps resetting the drive... but it will sit there and suck for two days just like md) Back when I used desktop…
http://www.t13.org/Documents/UploadedDocuments/docs2007/D169...
Until recently, you often needed a vendor-supplied MS-DOS executable to enable or modify ERC features on consumer drives, but smartmontools supports it as of v5.40, thanks to this guy:
http://www.csc.liv.ac.uk/~greg/projects/erc/
I just bought a 1.5TB Samsung HD154UI for $99 that supports ERC. There are reports that P-model variants of the WD 15EADS don't support TLER anymore, but I have several S- and R-model variants of that drive that do, including one that was manufactured in March; so it's still possible to get WD consumer drives that support TLER/ERC, you just have to be picky about the variant.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
TLER is well worth the 50% premium, in many cases. With desktop firmware, my experience has been that fully half the time when a disk fails, it doesn't properly fail, it retries forever. Linux MD and 3ware hardware raid (the only hardware raid I tried) both hang up waiting for the drive to fail. (the 3ware keeps resetting the drive... but it will sit there and suck for two days just like md) Back when I used desktop…
Many (most?) new consumer drives have support for ERC (the standard term for what WD calls "TLER"), which is part of the ATA-8 standard. See here for the spec (ERC is described in section 8.3.4): http://www.t13.org/Documents/UploadedDocuments/docs2007/D169... Until recently, you often needed a vendor-supplied MS-DOS executable to enable or modify ERC features on consumer drives, but smartmontools supports it as of v5…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many (most?) new consumer drives have support for ERC (the standard term for what WD calls "TLER"), which is part of the ATA-8 standard. See here for the spec (ERC is described in section 8.3.4): http://www.t13.org/Documents/UploadedDocuments/docs2007/D169... Until recently, you often needed a vendor-supplied MS-DOS executable to enable or modify ERC features on consumer drives, but smartmontools supports it as of v5…
huh. neat. where are you finding out what is and is not supported? user forms? or do drive data sheets actually have useful info?
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…
Software Raid-6 FTW.