Storage

Posted by Thomas Mon, 31 Jan 2005 22:01:35 +0000

This is a little scatterbrained, but for what it’s worth, here it is…

Well, if you read my last post, then you should know that I am in somewhat of a data crunch. If only I had been paying better (read any) attention to Mr. keystonelogic on Ebay. If I had, I might have been able to pick up an entire Fibre Channel array, including 10 36.4 IBM drives for anywhere between $195 and $255, plus shipping. THAT IS A STEAL! Although there is a Mr. retreadbdp that is selling a very similar product, but his start at $275.

Anyway, I meant to try and do a decent cost and feasibilty analysis of possible data storage solutions for myself. I figured that this would be a decent medium through which to do this…

Now, if I were to seriously get into video editing, which is why I need the extra storage, then I would also wind up getting another powerful machine just to do Premiere and Photoshop on. With this in mind, I then need to have data sharing between machines. This can be accomplished several ways:

  1. Firewire
  2. Fibre Channel
  3. Samba over TCP/IP

Firewire and Fibre Channel would be the most appropriate, since they speak directly to the hardware, instead of an intermediary of a host as would occur with the use of Samba, or NFS for that matter. Plus both Firewire and Fibre Channel have their own media over which to transmit data, whereas Samba would be over Ethernet (GigE, I would presume).

The speed of 1394a is 400Mb/s; the speed of 1394b is 800Mb/s; the speed of FC is 1.0625Gb/s (100MB/s); the speed of GigE is 1Gb/s, obviously…

Any Fibre Channel enclosure that I would buy would not only have hot-swap capability for the drives, but also redundant power supplies and dual communication loops to each and every drive.

We will assume that RAID will be done in software, rendering all of the disks as simply JBOD.

Internal SATA would be cheapest, but does not scale, because adding another drive requires adding another controller.

Fibre Channel requires smaller individual drives due to cost. After 36GB drives, the prices increase dramatically above what I consider to be acceptable, or $0.50 per GB.

Apparently it would cost $299 + $49 to get a SATA to 1394b enclosure from these guys. Then you still have to get the drive, which costs approx. $180, and that assumes that you could buy one 360GB SATA drive. That’s $528, and it’s not that scalable. You can’t buy a 360GB drive to get up to our supposed goal of a 360GB array. You could buy two drives to get to that 360GB goal, but then you eat up your scalability, as you can’t remove a drive that already has data on it. So, if you buy a 300GB drive for $189, and you leave room for the other future drive, then you just spent $537. And I’m not even sure that you really needed to buy that extra $49 SATA drive tray! I would like to go with SATA for their speed and hot swap capability, but I’m not exactly sure in this case how it would truly be that beneficial. Sure, if there were one encloure with, say, only 5 drive bays, as SATA drives are much cheaper in larger drive sizes than FC, and

  1. Hot Swap Drives
  2. Redundant Power
  3. Scalability
  4. Price

AMD Athlon 64 2800+: $109.00
EPoX “EP-8KDA3+”: $110.50
Corsair 512MBx2 DDR PC-3200: $133.50
Seagate 7200.8 400GB 7200RPM SATA NCQ: $369.99 * 5 = $1,849.95
Thermaltake SILENT BOOST A1838: $28.99

Grand Total: $2,231.94
Price per GB: $1.12
2TB and a screaming, 64bit machine: $Priceless

AMD Athlon 64 2800+: $109.00
EPoX “EP-8KDA3+”: $110.50
Corsair 512MBx2 DDR PC-3200: $133.50
Seagate 7200.8 200GB 7200RPM SATA NCQ: $135.00 * 5 = $675.00
Thermaltake SILENT BOOST A1838: $28.99

Grand Total: $1056.99
Price per GB: $1.06
1TB and a screaming, 64bit machine: $Priceless

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The West Wing

Posted by Thomas Mon, 31 Jan 2005 22:01:31 +0000

So, I figure that I am offically addicted to The West Wing, now. Not only did I have to rent The West Wing: The Complete Season 2: Disc 1 from Hastings because I finished the DVD that I had from NetFlix on Friday or Saturday, I watched 7 episodes yesterday, Sunday. I finished off the last one today, and then returned it! Which is quite a feat, if I do say so myself. Roughly 5.25 hours of The West Wing… Plus, since I returned the DVD the next day, I get a dollar back next time that I rent a movie from Hastings… Way to go me!

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Productivity

Posted by Thomas Sat, 29 Jan 2005 17:01:35 +0000

I was thinking about this a couple of days ago, but I didn’t get around to posting. I must say that I am getting worried about the job that I interviewed for the first part of January. He said that he would call either way, and that it would be about two weeks. Well, this past Wednesday was three weeks, and of course, this coming Wednesday will be four. So, this is disturbing. I did, though, apply for another job. Drew pointed this one out to me on Wednesday night, if I remember correctly. It’s with Brazos County as an Assistant Network Administrator. I filled out the application and redid my resume somewhat on Thursday night. Cole said that I should probably go ahead and submit a cover letter with the app and resume as well, so I took the better part of my Friday to get that all done. I finally got it mailed, or I should say that Nancy mailed it, Friday before 5pm. Hopefully they’ll give me a call next week.

I would hope that sending out an application alone might make me feel like I’ve been productive, but it really hasn’t. And, on top of that, I ran out of West Wing to see, so I can’t watch any more West Wing until NetFlix sends me more, which will be like Tuesday or Wednesday…

Plus, Marc and I really need to get on the CT Promo video for next year, plus I need to work on the brochure and maybe touch up the postcard, but board meeting is next Saturday, so I doubt that Carol will have those things as a high priority. Plus, I’ve got the computer for A&M UMC to build when it gets here, so that I can have some more money. Plus Cole needs me to look at his network, and Liz needs me to look at her computer as it’s not connecting to Resnet. And, since I figured out how to do DVD menus, I need to finish up the menus for “A Day in the Life of Thomas”, and maybe sell them to some peeps. Which would also make me some money, if only a little. But before I finish it, I still need to do the director’s commentary, which I think that I’ll ask Drew to co-comment on with me, if I can. And, I’m trying to write an open-source photo blog/gallery web application in JSP (because the guy who wrote Folderblog is a butt and didn’t open source his code…). I didn’t think that it would take very long, but it’s taking longer than I expected, and my interest is sloping downward in an exponention fashion. And I’m running out of disk space! I really need to procure me some more… which costs more money… and I’ll really be screwed if we need to capture too much more video, because I just don’t have the space to put it. And, I need to put more memory in both of the servers at Wesley… since I finally figured out a good place to put the two sticks that Drew gave me a long time ago…

Alas!

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Bloglines

Posted by Thomas Tue, 25 Jan 2005 22:01:24 +0000

I finally caught up on my reading. I had probably something on the order of 3000 posts to go through, so I had been putting it off. I did also last night finish hacking together a photoblog for Adan. Hopefully he’ll be able to post some pictures that he’s taking in Spain and show them in a nice photoblog/gallery looking format.

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Year of the Rooster

Posted by Thomas Thu, 20 Jan 2005 23:01:08 +0000

Different from the Chinese, I decree that at Wesley, it is the Year of the Stealth Relationship.

Let the dating begin… and then let the breakups begin…

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El Quiz

Posted by Thomas Sat, 01 Jan 2005 23:01:09 +0000

Since I generally despise these little quizzes, I’ll selectively answer some questions…

2. Did you keep your New Year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
i think new year’s resolutions are stupid

23. How many one-night stands?
Counting last night?… um, err… um, I lost count after twenty

25. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?
I’m a lover not a hater.

38. Who was the best new person you met?
Kellie and Liz and Frankie and Chad and Wayne and Justin and all those other cool new kiddos at the Wesley (i stole marc’s answer, it’s just so perfect) (I agree)

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