Disk Space Relief Inbound
After my desperate disk situation came to a head yesterday with 8GB (out of 2250) free space, I sucked it up and paid for a new ReadyNAS. I went with another NV+, this time with 4×1000GB DeskStar drives for a total of 3TB of usable space with a RAID 5-equivalent level of protection against data loss. I got this unit from eAegis, along with the 1GB memory upgrade. I used eAegis to source my last NV+ and had no complaints with their service, and this bundle with the 4×1TB drives is just a tad cheaper than getting them separately from NewEgg.
My plan is to move all my media files (music, photos, and video) to the new ReadyNAS, which will be a dedicated media store. All my other data, including software and personal files, will stay on nemes. That said, I will be moving all the nemes files temporarily so I can repave nemes with the new large-block filesystem Infrant introduced with version 4.0 of the NV+ firmware. That combined with jumbo frames and a dedicated GigE switch should give me CIFS speeds of nearly 30MB/s according to Infrant benchmarks.
Tags: infrant, Migrated from Drupal, raid, readynas, tech diary
December 10th, 2007 at 5:47 pm
Heads up on ReadyNAS
Did you pay the new astronomical price? They just raised prices anywhere from $2-400. And, for some reason the new firmware eats more disk space… go figure. I thought my Drobo was expensive, but with the new prices for the ReadyNAS, I don’t see buying another one.
Eddie.
December 11th, 2007 at 12:47 pm
The asking price for the bare-bones unit from eAegis is about $800, which is about what it was six months ago, so in real terms that’s a slight price drop. The real cost center is in the 4×1000GB disks.
The new firmware uses a larger block size (3.x was 4k; 4.x is some multiple of that), so if you can expect a larger on-disk size for small files, but as I understand it that’s a performance optimization for the more common use case which involves sequential access to large files, eg video streaming.
What does piss me off is that the ‘release’ version of the 4.0 firmware (p1 I think) has now been pulled because of some problems ppl have been having with random hangs of the box. I’ve had this happen to me three times now, and I have to yank the plug, do a hard reboot, and go through an hour long integrity check to get the box back on its feet. After months in beta I’d love to know how the fuck they missed that one.
December 17th, 2007 at 8:00 pm
In case you care, it’s
In case you care, it’s “…for a total of 3TB of usable space…” not 3GB
December 18th, 2007 at 10:45 am
Oops. Good catch.