[Gllug] Cheapish NAS.

[general_email at technicalbloke.com]

Nix wrote:
> On 18 Feb 2010, Peter Cannon said:
>
>   
>> Take a look at some of the refurbished stuff around, off the top of my head (I'm
>> in the trade) you should be able to pick a box up with a rubbish SATA drive
>> (40-100GB) for about £70-£80 +VAT. Western Digital (Green) 1TB SATA drives are
>> about £67 on ebuyer  (Inc VAT) you could put something nice together for £300 Cost
>> you just need to stick a disgusting markup on it :-)
>>     
>
> But take care. Cheap boxes often have not just rubbish SATA drives but
> rubbish controllers and buses, too, and that really can impair I/O
> speeds. I've seen RAID-5 4-disk read speeds rise from 40Mb/s (!) to >200Mb/s
> upon replacement of a single crap-as-anything controller chip... (and that
> chip itself was an improvement on the previous machine, which managed
> an awesome 11Mb/s sustained RAID-5 read rate. Party like it's 1991!)
>   

Yeah I can believe that, that's why I've budgeted twice as much for the
motherboard as for the chip. It's also why I'm going for software RAID
over a cheapo hardware RAID controller. TBH the performance doesn't need
to be killer, just better than the 12MB/s I've heard the droboshare
kicks out. I'd be quite happy if it could sustain 30MB/s or better, ~
2GB per minute should be plenty good enough for what they need.

Cheers,

Roger.
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