On Dec 27, 2006, at 10:25 AM, Michael Bishop wrote:
Jim Thompson wrote:
Intel OEMs a box with a 400MHz 80219 Xscale controller and a SATA
controller that will house up to 4 3.5" SATA drives.
It has 2xGigE + 2x USB 2.0 coming out of it, and .. it runs Linux,
and supports CIFS/SMB and NFS out of the box.
I've had my eye on this for a while. Looks to be best of breed for
now. However, the $500 price tag has me thinking of building a box
and installing FreeNAS.
http://www.freenas.org/
FreeNAS is a free NAS (Network-Attached Storage) <http://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network-attached_storage> server, supporting:
CIFS (samba), FTP, NFS, RSYNC protocols, local user authentication,
Software RAID (0,1,5) with a Full WEB configuration interface.
FreeNAS takes less than 32MB once installed on Compact Flash, hard
drive or USB key. The minimal FreeBSD distribution, Web interface,
PHP scripts and documentation are based on M0n0wall <http://
www.m0n0.ch/wall/>.
Yes, really, I know about FreeNAS. Netgate ships several thousand
copies of m0n0wall every month, its my job to understand whats going
on with m0n0wall
and its derivatives (pFsense, FreeNAS, etc.
There are potentially a couple differences between how I look at
things and how you look at things.
1) I look at a box like this and think "How can I make it better"?
"How can I make it a product that someone wants/needs?"
Certainly putting FreeBSD on the box, while non-trivial, is straight-
forward. (NetBSD runs on the CPU, so getting NetBSD to run on the
board is certainly straight-forward. I just helped get FreeBSD
running on the Intel Xscale IXP42x (so FreeBSD could be made to run
on the NSLU2 now), and the differences in CPU and bus structure can
be cribbed from the linux and NetBSD ports.
2) I know that ZFS support for FreeBSD is farther along than the
linux support for ZFS.
3) I know how to re-image m0n0wall (and thus FreeNAS) into something
to support additional features or configurations.
4) I know Intel OEMs this box (and where). Thus, I know the raw
margins on this box are well over 100%. :-)
5) I know there are several other boards of highly similar parts,
including one with a crypto accelerator on board, which means
transparent encryption to a set
of ZFS-managed drives, with minimum-to-know performance impact.
This is nearly critical in the medical field now, due to HIPPA rules.
6) I know where there is a 3U 15 drive rack with a highly-similar
board mounted inside. While this still has GigE onboard, it also has
a pair of Ultra-320 SCSI ports. IP over SCSI @ 11.25 TB (prior to
RAID overhead), anyone?
You might conclude that I'm considering building a product around all
this. About 70% of what I'm thinking is in this thread
http://www.intel.com/design/servers/storage/ss4000-E/
They're about $560, plus drives (see recent threads here for what
4 x 250GB fast SATA drives will cost, and note that 750GB SATA
drives are available,
should you really need 3TB of storage in your home. (MythTV
backend, anyone?)
IIRC, Max storage is 2TB. While you can put 750GB HDs in it you're
still limited to the 2TB ceiling.
Thats only because they could only get 500GB drives when the wrote
the datasheet. There is no "2TB ceiling". (There is a 2GB ceiling,
because 2GB = 2^31,
which means the largest (signed) 32-bit int is 2GB. (One Gigabyte
is 2^30, four GB is 2^32.)
Since one Terabyte is 2^40, you're not anywhere near a word boundary.
And I happen to know that 4 750GB SATA drives work in this box. :-)
jim
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