[ale] NAS recommendations

[Jeff Hubbs]

I still have my TO materials for the server I built and I had to consult 
them - it's been seven years. :)

I used two 3ware SAS cards for the 14 faster/smaller drives and a 3ware 
SATA card for eight slower/bigger drives. The production shares were on 
the SAS drives and the SATA drives were for offlining and processing 
backups. All the 3ware cards were JBOD and mdraid handled everything. 
The Supermicro mobo had six SATA ports; two went to 80GB drives on the 
front panel that were used for swap and /var and two went to SSDs inside 
the case that held /boot, /auxboot/, and root in an RAID1. The SAS 
drives were paired off, one per controller, made into RAID1, then all 
seven of those pairs were made into a RAID0. The splitting was so that I 
could lose an entire SAS controller and the md volume would just keep on 
running.

Using kernel raid and controllers in JBOD mode meant that if the primary 
machine's mobo *did* fry, I could just slam 22 disks from its front 
panel into the secondary, boot it up, change the IP address, and carry 
on. Pointy-hairs tend to want to only buy things with service 
contracts...well, I've seen many cases where the practical reality of 
having some tech figure out where your office is, row through traffic, 
and show up with a motherboard that turns out to be the wrong one so he 
has to go back to the shop, etc., etc. - once even server-grade hardware 
got commoditized and fairly well standardized, the 
DEC/HP/IBM/Sun/SGI/Dell way of dealing with breakage just didn't make 
sense. I know some people will go there anyway but my public-sector work 
ethic of committing to get the most value for the least money (later 
adding "under the least restrictive conditions" once I went Open Source) 
never left me.

Oh, and I also stuffed a high-end dual gig-E NIC in a slot (bonded) and 
used that for production. Much like with the disk controllers, you want 
to avoid depending on mobo functions where you can; I'd much rather 
replace a lightning-fried NIC than a motherboard.

On 6/15/17 10:21 PM, Raj Wurttemberg wrote:
> For those of you using custom NAS boxes, are you using a PCI RAID controller
> or are you using the motherboard SATA?
>
> /Raj
>
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