On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 10:45, Joel Buckley <joel.buck...@sun.com> wrote: > Consider the engineering effort going into every Sun Server. > Any system from Sun is more than sufficient for a home server. > You want more disks, then buy one with more slots. Done. In my experience, buying disks (or disk-related things---JBODs, NASs, etc.) from Sun is frustratingly expensive. Sure, the x4150 linked later is a good deal (if you don't mind spending a couple grand on a home system), but it only takes 2.5" drives inside it. Even with 146GB SAS drives (the largest bundled with it) 8 drives doesn't give 3TB. So, you need an external SAS or SCSI card at $500, and a place to put more (preferably 3.5") disks. Follow, if you will, the trek of someone attempting to do that at home.
Let's see... Sun.com, storage, find a product. Disk storage, that's right. Ah! The J4200 looks like just the thing. I want it with 4 1TB disks, so pick the model that includes 2 and add 2 more. Throw in a SAS cable so I can attach this to the x4150. Now take a look at the price... $5600. Add the host and the SAS card and the total is $8100 for a lousy 3 TB of disk space. I can't (for home use) warrant spending $8k for a >> file & music server , I don't care how well-tested it is, I can buy eight different kinds of hardware with 3TB of disk space for that, and I'd wager at least three of them would work out of the box, and then I'd have more available disk space than the Sun solution. For small enterprises like a home media box, I don't see the point of big, expensive, loud (!) machines like the x4150 et al. >> Decision #2: 1.5TB Seagate vs. 1TB WD (or someone else) The 1.5TB drives have a sketchy reputation as compared to any other Seagate drives. The rumor is that reliability was not high enough for the OEMs to carry them, so that's why they're so cheap. I have a thrown-together interface [1] that gets prices for drives from several online stores, and lets you sort by price, size, or price per gigabyte. The Samsung HD103UJ drives are nice, if you're not using NVidia controllers - there's a bug in either the drives or the controllers that makes them drop drives fairly frequently. They work fine with other controllers, though; I'm using 4 of them with a Marvell controller with no problems. Will [1]: http://will.incorrige.us/price-checker.cgi?sortby=costperGB _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
