<http://www.synetic.net/Synetic-Products/SyneRAID-Units/SyneRAID6-16-3U/SyneRAID6-SATA.htm>
No experience with them, but they're the best specs I've seen for SATA external RAID - decent processor and NCQ support.
There's quite a few companies making these SATA-to-SCSI and SATA-to-FC boxes. A lot of them look quite similar and have almost identical specs, and are probably just rebadged versions of the same box made somewhere in Taiwan/China.
http://www.excelmeridiandata.com/products/raid.shtml http://www.fibrenetix.co.uk/products/ http://www.infortrend.com/800600/eonstor.asp http://www.areasys.com/template.asp?content=index_ide_raid.asp
I'm sure a bit of google searching can find a lot more.
They appear to be reaonsably good value, and some of them have some nice features:
1. High density - eg. 12 400G SATA drives in 3U is a lot of space
2. RAID6 - some units now have what they call "RAID6", which is RAID5 with double parity. That's different to RAID5+hotspare in that 2 drives can fail simultaneously with no problems. Nice if you have high IO load situation, since if 1 drive fails, and you wait for it to rebuild to the hotspare it could be 24+ hours, quite a danger time for another drive to possibly fail in a big 12 or 16 drive array.
3. All-in-one - Sure you could have a PC motherboard and SATA controller card and an appropriate, but then you've got another OS to maintain/upgrade, etc. These tend to come as one box that you slide the drives in, create the partitions through a web-interface, and away you go. They often offer monitoring via a web-interface, and active alerting through SNMP and/or SMTP email.
4. Battery backup - most of them come with 128M-1024M of cache, and an optional battery backup option so you can use write-back caching which definitely helps performance
Areasys include a blurb why they think it's better than a "build your own" solution, but of course make up your own mind.
http://www.areasys.com/pdf/2012_vs_HomeMadeStorageServer.pdf
We've used two different boxes from different companies and so far they've worked great. Hmmm, hope I'm not tempting murphy by saying that... ;)
Rob
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