ok, Scott, that sounded sincere. I am not going to do the pic thing on you.
But do I have to spell this out to you -- somethings are invented not for home use? Cindy, would you want to do ZFS at home, or just having some wine and music? Can we focus on commercial usage? please! ----- Original Message ----- From: "Scott Laird" <sc...@sigkill.org> To: "Brandon High" <bh...@freaks.com> Cc: <zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org>; "Peter Korn" <peter.k...@sun.com> Sent: Wednesday, January 07, 2009 9:28 PM Subject: Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS? > On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 4:53 PM, Brandon High <bh...@freaks.com> wrote: >> On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 7:45 AM, Joel Buckley <joel.buck...@sun.com> >> wrote: >>> How much is your time worth? >> >> Quite a bit. >> >>> 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. >> >> A few years ago, I put together the NAS box currently in use at home >> for $300 for 1TB of space. Mind you, I recycled the RAM from another >> box and the four 250GB disks were free. I think 250 drives were around >> $200 at the time, so let's say the system price was $1200. >> >> I don't think there's a Sun server that takes 4+ drives anywhere near >> $1200. The X4200 uses 2.5" drives, but costs $4255. Actually adding >> more drives ups the cost further. That means the afternoon I spent >> setting my server up was worth $3000. I should tell my boss that. >> >> A more reasonable comparison would be the Ultra 24. A system with >> 4x250 drives is $1650. I could build a 4 TB system today for *less* >> than my 1TB system of 2 years ago, so let's use 3x750 + 1x250 drives. >> (That's all the store will let me) and the price jumps to $2641. >> >> Assume that I buy the cheapest x64 system (the X2100 M2 at $1228) and >> add a drive tray because I want 4 drives ... well I can't. The >> cheapest drive tray is $7465. >> >> I have trouble justifying Sun hardware for many business applications >> that don't require SPARC, let alone for the home. For custom systems >> that most tinkerers would want at home, a shop like Silicon Mechanics >> (http://www.siliconmechanics.com/) (or even Dell or HP) is almost >> always a better deal on hardware. > > I agree completely. About a year ago I spent around $800 (w/o drives) > on a NAS box for home. I used a 4x PCI-X single-Xeon Supermicro MB, a > giant case, and a single 8-port Supermicro SATA card. Then I dropped > a pair of 80 GB boot drives and 9x 500 GB drives into it. With raidz2 > plus a spare, that gives me around 2.7T of usable space. When I > filled that up a few weeks back, I bought 2 more 8-port SATA cards, 2 > Supermicro CSE-M35T-1B 5-drive hot-swap bays, and 9 1.5T drives, all > for under $2k. That's around $0.25/GB for the expansion and $0.36 > overall, including last year's expensive 500G drives. > > The closest that I can come to this config using current Sun hardware > is probably the X4540 w/ 500G drives; that's $35k for 14T of usable > disk (5x 8-way raidz2 + 1 spare + 2 boot disks), $2.48/GB. It's much > nicer hardware but I don't care. I'd also need an electrician (for 2x > 240V circuits), a dedicated server room in my house (for the fan > noise), and probably a divorce lawyer :-). > > Sun's hardware really isn't price-competitive on the low end, > especially when commercial support offerings have no value to you. > There's nothing really wrong with this, as long as you understand that > Sun's really only going to be selling into shops where Sun's support > and extra engineering makes financial sense. In Sun's defense, this > is kind of an odd system, specially built for unusual requirements. > > My NAS box works well enough for me. It's probably eaten ~20 hours of > my time over the past year, partially because my Solaris is really > rusty and partially because pkg has left me with broken, unbootable > systems twice :-(. It's hard to see how better hardware would have > helped with that, though. > > > Scott > _______________________________________________ > zfs-discuss mailing list > zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org > http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
