Quote:
Originally Posted by Murlocke 
The hardware without the drives is about $1000-$1200 per server, case being the most expensive part of each. I probably paid about $35 per TB ($105/3TB) because of bulk purchases, so probably around $2905 on hard drives. I would say ~$2500 per server would be in the ballpark. I didn't build these over night, I've been adding hard drives to them for around 4 years now.
It's up to the user if he wants to add that many data disks. You don't lose all data in the rare case you have 2 drive failures at the same time, like you do with other RAID solutions. It will support dual parity in the future for people that want 2 drive failures. unRAID is not designed for businesses, it's designed for home users. I agree that 1 parity for 23 data disks is very risky for a business that could lose millions if they lost critical data, but for a home user, it's usually more than enough. If I had 2 drives fail I would need to replace at most, 6TB of data (Which is around 200 blu-rays) and in the ~4 years of using unRAID I have not had it happen yet. I like these odds much better than having over 20TB of space used for parity, most home users do not need that excessive protection in my opinion. Replacing 200 movies would be a headache, but it wouldn't be the end of the world, and it would cost nearly twice as much to get this much usable space on something like ZFS because you'd never add this many drives to a striped array.
Cache drives act as a middle man, when transferring 30-50GB files to the server, they need to fit on the cache drive until it moves them over (You set how often you want to do this, I have mine set weekly). I constantly transfer 500+ GB to the server so it wouldn't work well. An SSD would also be limited by my gigabit network anyway, and a 1TB black is much more affordable.
The hardware without the drives is about $1000-$1200 per server, case being the most expensive part of each. I probably paid about $35 per TB ($105/3TB) because of bulk purchases, so probably around $2905 on hard drives. I would say ~$2500 per server would be in the ballpark. I didn't build these over night, I've been adding hard drives to them for around 4 years now.
It's up to the user if he wants to add that many data disks. You don't lose all data in the rare case you have 2 drive failures at the same time, like you do with other RAID solutions. It will support dual parity in the future for people that want 2 drive failures. unRAID is not designed for businesses, it's designed for home users. I agree that 1 parity for 23 data disks is very risky for a business that could lose millions if they lost critical data, but for a home user, it's usually more than enough. If I had 2 drives fail I would need to replace at most, 6TB of data (Which is around 200 blu-rays) and in the ~4 years of using unRAID I have not had it happen yet. I like these odds much better than having over 20TB of space used for parity, most home users do not need that excessive protection in my opinion. Replacing 200 movies would be a headache, but it wouldn't be the end of the world, and it would cost nearly twice as much to get this much usable space on something like ZFS because you'd never add this many drives to a striped array.
Cache drives act as a middle man, when transferring 30-50GB files to the server, they need to fit on the cache drive until it moves them over (You set how often you want to do this, I have mine set weekly). I constantly transfer 500+ GB to the server so it wouldn't work well. An SSD would also be limited by my gigabit network anyway, and a 1TB black is much more affordable.
Gotcha answered my "real world" question about it. I'd move over to this for my personal NAS as it seems its best for home use when you need max storage space, but I also use my NAS for VMware lab I have, and that still needs speed.
Yea different environments defiantly. They needed a wee bit more speed
It was a ZFS based array, set up as a two x8 drive raid 5 arrays stripped.
We were getting 1600MB/s reads internally on the server
. Must've been a big pile of work !
