[Beowulf] Any recommendations for a good JBOD?

Rahul Nabar rpnabar at gmail.com
Thu Feb 18 09:37:36 PST 2010


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.

-- 
Rahul



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