NASLite Network Attached Storage

It creeps up on you. We now have 2TB of programing collected from our ReplayTvs. Now while most of this stuff is "non critical"....it would be nice to pull up an old NOVA PBS program from time to time without worry.

Hence my questions:

What is the absolutely least expensive method to configure NASLite 2 for such storage? Keep in mind that conventional PATA disks have become "non attractive" for many - and so sell at significant discounts vs their SATA counterparts. What is the optimal method for "surfing" the tensions between the old and the new?

I've seen these PC towers with 12 disk slots. What is the least expensive plan for populating such a case and operating from NAS lite? Is there any way to configure NASLITE to maintain all drives in a sleep mode until specifically spun up by a wake command? Is there any way to map all 12 drives to a single drive letter including those still in a sleep mode?

And BTW...I consider NASLite's multiple disk model to be it's strength. Everyone within the AVS biz seems to be pushing users into these gigantic power sucking RAIDs.

http://lime-technology.com/


Well folks...I would term most video to be "non critical data". If you did have a drive fail - just what are the earth shalking consequences? Wouldn't it simply be more prudent to preserve critical video on a separate fault tolerant server?

KISS. Keep it simple stupid. NASlite potentially is a replacement for that jumbled mess of serial drives and drive trays. It may be "good enough".

NL does not support spin down of the drives or any power saving.

As far your application, RAID5 is the best way to get a bunch of disks to look like one big one and have protection as well if so desired. This uses only one drive worth of space for data protection and you gat a speed boost as well. So you take say five 400GB drives and run them in a RAID5 array you will get 1.6TB of storage with parity data protection. There really is not a down side to it that I can see.

Mike

1. Last year, Luiz Andre Barraso of Google also published an interesting article on the same topic in ACM Queue (See The Price of Performance) where he described cost trends of large IT infrastructure such as Google's with couple of interesting graphs. Some of the key points mentioned are:

Every gain in performance has been accompanied by a proportional inflation in overall platform power consumption. The result of these trends is that power related costs are an increasing fraction of the TCO.

The energy costs of that system today would already be more than 40 percent of the hardware costs. (The system is a x86 server worth $3,000 consuming 200 watts on average).

If performance per watt is to remain constant over the next few years, power costs could easily overtake hardware costs, possibly by a large margin.

2. http://www.nber.org/sys-admin/linux-nas-raid.html


It ain't easy friend....

We're going the "other way" by compartmentalizing the inevitable losses...and building multiple levels of redundancy for that small portion which really matters.

If we get this thing working as we hope....losses will occur. But we're also not taking the expense hit for reliability which "just ain't there". RAID is oversold.

I agree in concept.

I only keep the my DVD backups and some other files, such as family pics/videos, important docs, that would be hard work to replace on RAID 5.

The rest of the stuff is on non-raid disks.

I have to wonder though, whether the additional cost, both hardware and software of having one additional disk for raid 5 and a raid card is not worth it.

I currently have a 3/4 full RAID 5(2TB) array and about 1.2TB of files on single disks(5 in total). If I streamlined these single disks to a 4x400 array

I would get similar power consumption without much additional cost.

On the subject of power consumption. I do data center power and networking and so can say that the major cost is in the power needed to run and cool the data center.

The great thing about NASLite is that the need for modern, multi processor, ultra fast servers is not there. You can get vertualy the same performance from a simple celeron 500MHz computer with half a gigabyte of RAM that you would from a dual processor multi gigabyte wonder server. This is assuming that all you want to do is server up shares and store/pull files to/from it. The newer drives are really good about power consumption and some have the ability to be tunned to consume even less using utilities from the manufacturers.

I look at it this way. The cost of running my NASLite box may be at most $10.00 per month, likely more in the area of $3.00. I will forgo those couple of foofy coffee drinks a couple of days a month for the great utility it provides. I am just glad I don't have the electric bill for 100 plus servers and all the associated network hardware that one of the data centers I work in has.

Mike

PS, RAID5 has saved my ass a number of times in the past. I will suffer the performance hit in I/Os per second and the extra energy required any day.

The primary use of RAID technology is to reduce the impact of disk failure.

In a commercial environment, where the cost of the time required to replace a failed disk and restore data from a backup - assuming this is available - can be quantified in lost revenue, the additional cost of RAID is easily justifiable.

Things are only slightly different in a consumer environment, those of us who run RAID at home do so for a very similar reason, typically we have large collections of video and audio and even if we have the original media and can restore the data from it, we are unwilling to spend the time required.

The perceived value of RAID is therefore directly related to the value the individual places on his/her time.