[Tfug] NAS suggestions

[Bexley Hall]

Hi Harry,

Rob enjoy his "vacation"?

--- On Sun, 10/14/12, Harry McGregor <micros at osef.org> wrote:

> Disk on wire type stuff, you would want to look at either
> ATAoE or iSCSI, which are both block level.
> 
> I suspect you probably want file system on wire, which would
> be NFS or CIFS.

Correct.  By "disk" I meant the colloquial sense.  I need to
be able to talk to the store from several different types of
hosts (I'd hate to have to move the data from host A to
host B just so that host B can move it onto the NAS)
 
> If your willing to throw a lot of CPU and memory at the
> problem to reduce the amount of actual disk, I would look at
> SDFS (www.opendedupe.org).
> 
> Do you want the drives hot swap/front accessible?

No.  This is a temporary requirement.  I just want someplace
to dump daily/hourly snapshots with some "reasonable" expectation
of being able to retrieve a particular timestamp with relative
ease.  E.g., the most common problem is deciding that I've made
an "inadvisable" change to a schema and need to "backpedal" to
get back to a place where things worked better.  (The second
most common problem is when I botch an update and clobber some
data that I hadn't intended to clobber -- and don't notice it until
I've done subsequent damage to the remaining dataset.) 
 
> I prefer ECC in server applications.   Also
> eSATA can work quite well with a SATA multiplier.
> 
> As far as drives go, I would look at 5400RPM HGST drives
> (now owned by WD) or 7200RPM WD Black.
> 
> Larger the better to start with, either 3x3TB or 3x4TB in
> Raid5 would be a good starting point.

Again, I don't think the need for redundancy/ENHANCED reliability
really justifies the added cost/complexity -- I'd rather throw
the extra disk space at postponing the day when I've got to sort
out what to keep/discard.

I think I'm going to look at building a small FreeBSD box
(I don't think NetBSD supports USB3 reliably, yet) with
just basic file services and see how it fares.  Doing
"nothing else" it should be relatively easy to get decent
performance out of the host -- NIC will be the bottleneck.

Thx,
--don