Heres a NAS we talked about early. Something that uses all 2.5" drives.

 

http://evercu.be/

Interesting design!  Looks a little rough around the edges, but I'm sure he'll hone it a bit more as he makes them in bulk.  I love that it is Open Hardware also.  Of course the current hard drive shortage is going to make filling this thing up with 1 TB 2.5" drives ungodly expensive.

 

And of course there's the biggest question - will it run unRAID?

Totally pointless. I bet my Linkstation LS-VL (with a Kirkwood CPU) would use less power and make less noise with a single 4TB 3.5" drive. With a drive spun up, it still only used 10W.

Totally pointless. I bet my Linkstation LS-VL (with a Kirkwood CPU) would use less power and make less noise with a single 4TB 3.5" drive. With a drive spun up, it still only used 10W.

 

Maybe true, but you can't get parity protection with a single drive.

buy 2 4TB drives then?

 

It is a neat design and all.. It defiantly intrigues me.

 

Being ultra small is really slick....but I much rather have something like a HP microserver if I was to get another mini server. while the HP is bigger, the price point and size of the hard drives (let alone the hardware) is not enough to overcome my budget or needs.

 

I have a friend that pretty much lives in an RV. He has solar panels by day and batteries at night. this would be good from him.

 

then again... drool if you filled it with SSD drives. Imagine a few years from now when a 1TB SSD is $100. It might have to build that 20TB all SSD unraid beast.

interesting design  BUT  very very expansive.

 

400+ euro?!?!?!

A few years from now when a 1TB SSD costs $100 a single 4kx4k movie will take 1 TB or more hehe

 

Now, take that exact design but scale it for 3.5" and you'd still have something very small but more practical for a home use scenario.  It only need be 1" wider and maybe the same longer.

It's an OK looking box, but I don't see anything to get too excited about. The fan on one side with just a single row of vent holes on the other side makes little sense.

 

Lets assume both SSD's and platters costing the same price point double in size at the same rate. SSD's will have to go through about 3 size doublings before we see 1T SSD's for around $130. By that time we could buy a 24T platter drive for $130...

 

It'll be a long time before SSD's will compete price wise with platter drives for high density storage.

 

Peter

 

A few years from now when a 1TB SSD costs $100 a single 4kx4k movie will take 1 TB or more hehe

 

Now, take that exact design but scale it for 3.5" and you'd still have something very small but more practical for a home use scenario.  It only need be 1" wider and maybe the same longer.

 

True, but then you would introduce issues with heat and power consumption that the EverCube gets to avoid.  You would need bigger fans, a bigger PSU, etc.

I was talking about uber FAST storage ssd array, not so much high density.

 

The 1TB SSD's have been announced. i am sure they are beyond expensive now. it was more of a hypothetical joke (or wish)..

 

while a 2.5" drive storage array for home is a cute gimmick, it will never be comparable to a 3.5" for price per GB.

 

I am sure a few people that travel a lot, myself included  would like to have a portable server you could fit in your pocket.

for me, I have a micro sized atom based server/HTPC that's slightly bigger then a mac-mini with 5TB in it (not protected).

 

I will remind you SAS arrays are 2.5" form factor. just not cost effective for consumer use.

then again... drool if you filled it with SSD drives. Imagine a few years from now when a 1TB SSD is $100. It might have to build that 20TB all SSD unraid beast.

 

I've already built a prototype SSD server.  Currently has 5 trayless hot swap 2.5" bays (I think I paid something like $40 for all 5 drive bays during some Newegg sale).  It is built into a Thermaltake V6 which is obviously over-sized for an SSD server, but I don't have any SFF cases laying around.  I'm only using very small budget SSDs - 64 GB parity, and 60-64 GB data disks.  I also short stroked a traditional laptop HDD to 64 GB to compare transfer speeds against the SSDs.  As you might image, the server is fast as hell (I think the max write speed I recorded was around 90 mb/s to the parity protected array).  A cache drive is pretty much useless in an SSD server, so the current max is 20 data drives and 1 parity.  The thing is, who wants to pay $1000+ for a server with under 1TB of storage?  Pretty much no-one.  Once the network bonding code that Tom added to beta13 bears fruit, then these kinds of servers might make more sense for multi-user small office types of settings (lots of small files, continuous access, the kinds of things that HDDs choke on).

 

Also, I spec'd out a full blown 21 drive SSD server just last night to see if it was feasible given the rising price of HDDs.  The design is based around the OCZ Vertex Plus 120GB SSD which I consider to be the best bang-for-your-buck in terms of larger capacity SSDs at the moment.  I also wanted it to be ESXi compatible so I used some of the parts from your Atlas build.  The results?  $4300 for a server with a 2.4 TB capacity   Very fast and very low powered, but still...talk about a niche market.

Yeah I just thought that server was kinda cool. Not practical for any of my uses, but thought it would kick out some interesting points of view here.

That won't even be someone's thought until SSD prices are just as low as hard drives. Only 90MB/sec? That Synology I'm debating on buying uses standard 3.5" drives and has a sustained write speed of 165MB/sec and it is much less then $4300. Read speeds are almost 200MB/sec. Hey, how did you end up with all those SSD drives? They are quite expensive, no?

 

 

 

 

then again... drool if you filled it with SSD drives. Imagine a few years from now when a 1TB SSD is $100. It might have to build that 20TB all SSD unraid beast.

 

I've already built a prototype SSD server.  Currently has 5 trayless hot swap 2.5" bays (I think I paid something like $40 for all 5 drive bays during some Newegg sale).  It is built into a Thermaltake V6 which is obviously over-sized for an SSD server, but I don't have any SFF cases laying around.  I'm only using very small budget SSDs - 64 GB parity, and 60-64 GB data disks.  I also short stroked a traditional laptop HDD to 64 GB to compare transfer speeds against the SSDs.  As you might image, the server is fast as hell (I think the max write speed I recorded was around 90 mb/s to the parity protected array).  A cache drive is pretty much useless in an SSD server, so the current max is 20 data drives and 1 parity.  The thing is, who wants to pay $1000+ for a server with under 1TB of storage?  Pretty much no-one.  Once the network bonding code that Tom added to beta13 bears fruit, then these kinds of servers might make more sense for multi-user small office types of settings (lots of small files, continuous access, the kinds of things that HDDs choke on).

 

Also, I spec'd out a full blown 21 drive SSD server just last night to see if it was feasible given the rising price of HDDs.  The design is based around the OCZ Vertex Plus 120GB SSD which I consider to be the best bang-for-your-buck in terms of larger capacity SSDs at the moment.  I also wanted it to be ESXi compatible so I used some of the parts from your Atlas build.  The results?  $4300 for a server with a 2.4 TB capacity   Very fast and very low powered, but still...talk about a niche market.

I wonder how this would perform with the Seagate Momentus XT drives?

 

Raj, ever try your SSD server with a bank of those?

 

Also, on those OCZ drives? Any personal issues discovered?  Reviews seem to make me cautious.

That won't even be someone's thought until SSD prices are just as low as hard drives. Only 90MB/sec? That Synology I'm debating on buying uses standard 3.5" drives and has a sustained write speed of 165MB/sec and it is much less then $4300. Read speeds are almost 200MB/sec. Hey, how did you end up with all those SSD drives? They are quite expensive, no?

 

So does the synology have 10gb Ethernet or something?

That won't even be someone's thought until SSD prices are just as low as hard drives. Only 90MB/sec? That Synology I'm debating on buying uses standard 3.5" drives and has a sustained write speed of 165MB/sec and it is much less then $4300. Read speeds are almost 200MB/sec. Hey, how did you end up with all those SSD drives? They are quite expensive, no?

 

We built a test box at work with an SSD then switched to laptop drives. The laptop drives in RAID outperformed the SSD's.

We put 6x 500GB samsung 2.5" laptop drives in raid6 and got around 500MB/s. of course that was local on the box and not across the wire.

 

The 1U we were using only had 2.5" mounts so that was what we had to work with. The production boxes based on the test box have 15k SAS drives in it instead.

 

you get the extra speed because you are using multiple drives  as a single drive combining the resources into a pool.

It's just built for performance.

It's just built for performance.

 

I'm just wondering how it manages to deliver 200MB/s since Gig Ethernet can only do about 120MB/s

 

Firewire Maybe?

network binding of multiple nics perhaps.

90-100 mb/s is about the fastest we can hope for in unRAID for the time being (Gigabit LAN maxes out at 125 mb/s, then there's overhead that detracts from that).  Once network bonding/teaming is stable, then we can achieve faster transfer speeds with SSDs or fast HDDs.

 

Johnm: Haven't yet tried my SSD server with Hybrid drives (such as the Seagate Momentus XT), but it is on my list.  Throwing those drives into my SSD server spreadsheet returns: $4535 for 10TB.  Better, but still a far cry from 3.5" drives.

 

I really wish OCZ would put out some Linux drivers so that we could use the new hybrid RevoDrive.  It is the only reasonably affordable 1 TB SSD on the market today (if you can call $500 affordable).  However, I've asked OCZ's head of marketing directly if they will ever support anything besides Windows on their RevoDrives, and the answer was simply 'No'.  At least she was honest.

 

I personally have had no issues with any of the OCZ or Corsair SSDs that I've used, but they are all the SATAII models.  I think it is the SATAIII models that are having some issues.

 

opentoe: I've picked up my various SSDs just by watching the sales for months on end.  The first few I bought were 60-64 GB models for about $120 (that was about a year ago).  Later, I found 60 - 64 GB models for around $60 - 80 each.  The only 120 GB SSD I own is an original RevoDrive (uses the PCIe x4 interface instead of SATA and is VERY fast) which is my Win7 desktop's boot drive.

It's just built for performance.

 

I'm just wondering how it manages to deliver 200MB/s since Gig Ethernet can only do about 120MB/s

 

Firewire Maybe?

 

It has 2x 1GB Ethernet onboard. Link Aggregation.