BTW what software did they use to make these swanky diagrams:
http://blog.backblaze.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/backblaze-storage-pod-power-wiring-diagram.jpg

I’d like to make diagrams like that too.

http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/archives/5899-some-perspective-to-this-diy-storage-server-mentioned-at-storagemojo.html

For another perspective on this.

The seagate ST31500341AS seems to have a huge failure rate. People seem to be going through one a month. Even with RAID 6 is this an acceptable failure rate?

@bob: Thanks for the input, but it’s “put up or shut up” time. I don’t know you, and I doubt many of the other people here do either. If you want anyone to take what you have to say seriously then you should be able to give, at least some, examples of what “flaws” you’re referring to. Otherwise, we have to assume that, like the majority of people that post on internet message boards, you’re just talking out your rectum and don’t have a clue.

I think most of the negative comments on this solution are due to the lack of access to the software that runs the solution. The redundancy isn’t in the hardware (each red box is essentially designed to be throw away as I understand the solution). The beauty of this solution is in the software (which no one has access to, and they don’t really want to talk about – naturally, because that is their business edge) and how that software doesn’t require huge, complex redundant hardware systems.

When you can build the hardware for next to nothing compared to commercial hardware storage solutions, who cares if you lose an entire rack of these boxes, because they were so cheap to build, they have 6 other copies of the data (made up number) in other racks and data centers. I’ve read some comments trashing speed, but when you realize that most people don’t have a fat enough pipe to strain these servers, that’s not an issue either.

My assumption is that these boxes are seen as expensive 67TB hard drives in themselves. Cheap interface board (mobo, cpu, ram, boot drive) and high capacity in the hardware were the goal of the project, allowing the maintainers to write the redundancy into the software end and not worry about a higher downtime per box, because the box itself isn’t critical.

*** I could be completely wrong. I’m just saying take another look at it and recognize that none of us have the whole picture due to the missing software component. I wouldn’t build one of these for personal use or for my business. ***

@phoenix

Could it be PCI bus speeds? better I/O per raid array via more channels? I dunno on that one. Good question. I do know they have nine backplanes, and this way they only have one extra port instead of three extra sata ports. No real logic there, just pointing it out.

Apparently, it won’t let me post my bibliography, lets try it with broken links:

Bibliography:
hxtp://db.usenix.org/events/fast07/tech/schroeder/schroeder_html/index.html
hxtp://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf
hxtp://permabit.wordpress.com/2008/08/20/are-fibre-channel-and-scsi-drives-more-reliable
hxtp://www.eweek.com/c/a/Data-Storage/Hard-Disk-MTBF-Flap-or-Farce
hxtp://blog.econtech.selfip.org/2008/09/56-chance-your-hard-drive-is-not-fully-readable-a-lawsuit-in-the-making

@colecoman1982 – I was going to post a link but didn’t in the end because out of the several places I’ve seen criticisms, no single post summed up everything flawlessly. Also the link that was posted 2 or 3 comments up did cover most things.

I guess a lot of storage experts are a bit annoyed because they’ve been making cheap storage units without the noobular errors for some time but obviously you only get attention with a shiny red paintjob and some nice exploded diagrams. It is a shame that doing it properly is too boring.

to M4CGYV3R, untrue, they are using conventional drives, not solid state, and with data storage traffic they will degrade over time. of course solid state would about quadruple your total cost, but so far there is no long term permanent fool proof storage option for data. vigilance is always going to be a necessary ingredient.

I wonder what the price difference is between using these cards versus a couple nice 3ware cards.

The newer 3ware can span multiple arrays over multiple controllers – and has a 16 port model (IIRC). Performance would be significantly better.

I see comments and an article below that addresses the low speed of the system, how it is limited by the bus, the board, the ram, etc etc.

This system is meant to be connected to the internet… via ethernet…. the best it would ever see in speed is 1 Gbit, the max the ethernet card can provide….

What is the disadvantage in speed then in the sata bus or whatever… if your major bottleneck is the actual ethernet card?

Also, I see many comments on redundancy… on another site someone said how the system was not for “real life like in yahoo or google” because of the lack of redundancy…. I don’t see dual power supplies on the google server (linked on this very same article)… and those are servers used on very real life applications.

This system seems perfect for what it was designed for IMHO.

@b0red: The google servers are for computation, not data storage. If and when a google server fails, the upstream software will simply have a different server do the work the broken one was supposed to do. Very little data is kept on each server, and all of the data is easily replaceable, of little consequence, and probably replicated elsewhere anyway.

For that $-u could get twice the TBs off of new egg with old AMANDA backing ya up. f(x)=bulk purchase external firewire drives, copy and paste the config file from the renegade site and let the daisy chain via USB and fire wire cook. I’ve got 30 TBs going now and it is smoking!

@Shadyman
He’s not talking about power loss due to the grid going out, he’s talking about the power supply giving power to the hard drives failing.