[Beowulf] Any recommendations for a good JBOD?

[Alex Chekholko]

On Thu, 18 Feb 2010 11:37:36 -0600
Rahul Nabar <rpnabar at gmail.com> wrote:

> Discussions that I read on this list in the last couple of months
> tempt me to do away with hardware RAID entirely for a new
> mini-storage-project I have to do. I am thinking of going for a JBOD
> with Linux Software RAID via mdadm. Hardware RAID just doesn't have
> the original awesomeness that it had me mesmerized with.
> 
> Any recommendations for a good JBOD? The requirements are simple. 5
> Terabytes total capacity. SATA drives. Don't need high performance:
> these are for archival home dirs. No active jobs run from this
> storage. Reliability and low price are key. Some kind of
> Direct-Attached Storage box. RAID5 or RAID6 maybe. Already have a
> pretty fast 8 core server with lots of RAM that I can hook this up to.
> Neither bandwidth nor IOPS  need to be terribly high. Most of the data
> here is pretty static and not often moved around.
> 
> One of the things I notice is that 5 Terabytes seems too low-end these
> days. Can't find many solutions tailored to this size. Most come with
> 12 or 16 bays etc. which seems excessive for this application.
> 

Does it need to be rack-mount?  What kind of interface?

If performance is really not an issue, a consumer-level NAS box is
probably your cheapest option.  A QNap TS-410 is ~$450 plus 4 x 2TB
drives...

-- 
Alex Chekholko   chekh at pcbi.upenn.edu