8TB NAS runs Linux (LinuxDevices) [LWN.net]

LinuxDevices takes a look at Seagate's soon to be released NAS device. "Seagate is readying a four-bay network-attached storage device for small businesses that runs embedded Linux and stores up to 8TB. The hot-swappable BlackArmor NAS 440 offers an iTunes server and DLNA-compliant media server, RAID 0/1/5/10, dual gigabit Ethernet ports, and four USB ports, says Seagate. With the BlackArmor NAS 440, Seagate has launched its first homegrown, small business NAS device, re-launching a BlackArmor brand that it picked up when it acquired Maxtor in 2006."

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8TB NAS runs Linux (LinuxDevices)

Posted Mar 27, 2009 7:09 UTC (Fri) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750) [Link]

Heh, have to make a notice that Western-Digital is currently the only manufacturer shipping 2TB drives. Seagate had it in plans for 3Q/08 if I remember correctly, but it might take some extra time because they want to prevent the PR catastrophe from 1.5TB drives.

Anyway, my current criteria for buying a NAS device is that there is official support for it in a stable Debian release :)

8TB NAS runs Linux (LinuxDevices)

Posted Mar 27, 2009 14:37 UTC (Fri) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]

What would be the utility of RAID6 in a four-bay device?

8TB NAS runs Linux (LinuxDevices)

Posted Mar 28, 2009 11:19 UTC (Sat) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]

Safety against two bad disks.

8TB NAS runs Linux (LinuxDevices)

Posted Mar 28, 2009 11:52 UTC (Sat) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link]

> What would be the utility of RAID6 in a four-bay device?

The same as the utility of my 4-way SATA based md/raid, main system
RAID-6, I have on my main machine, here at home. That is, the same as a
3-way RAID-5, with the assurance of a second parity algorithm and stripe,
thus allowing two drives to go down without loss of data. Due to the
additional stress put on the remaining drives during a rebuild, if a drive
was about to fail, that's a likely time for it to do so, and having the
second backup provides a bit more peace of mind during the rebuild and as
a consequence, during normal operation as well.

Given a suitably independent bus setup such that the bottleneck remains
the disks, not the bus or CPU (unlikely in the age of multi-core), even
the 3-way-write just to write a single spindle's data stripe isn't a big
deal, and the additional data security over a 3-spindle RAID-5 or even a
4-spindle RAID-10 is worth it, for some users under some circumstances.

But given the incremental cost, a 5- or 6-way would be far better,
yielding much faster read speeds for the same minimum 3-way-write
tradeoff, you are correct.

...

I've dreamt of using 4- or 5-way port-multipliers, either the 5-way
external drive arrays or the 4x2.5" in a single 5.25" drive bay solutions,
then setting up 4-5 of them in RAID-6, configured with a hot-spare per
port-multiplier/housing, so only 3-4 active per multiplier thus not
overloading the SATA-300s too much. Total of 16-25 spindles, 4-6 of them
hot-spares so 12-20 of them active RAID-6, minus the two parity stripes is
10-18 data stripes operating in parallel, port-multiplied over 4-6
independent SATA-300 ports, for disk I/O at a decent fraction of memory
speed... Now /that/ would be a "nice" home workstation, and at today's
prices, it's not all that far out of reason, either. Of course at full
power I might have the cops busting in the door looking for my grow-op,
and/or the neighbors complaining about the jet engine testing next door,
but...

8TB NAS runs Linux (LinuxDevices)

Posted Mar 27, 2009 16:57 UTC (Fri) by dlapine (guest, #7358) [Link]

Get a Thecus n5200pro. That will saturate a 100base connection with no problem. It also has 5 bays, so you will get a lot closer to 8TB (probably hit 7TB after format and reserved space). It's about $100 less than the seagate model and lacks the auto backup feature.

Been a Thecus n5200 for 2 years, and I've updated it from 250G drives to 320G to 1.5TB seagates. No issues, no data loss.

This does look like a nice option with a "Brand name" for small businesses.

8TB NAS runs Linux (LinuxDevices)

Posted Mar 30, 2009 23:11 UTC (Mon) by kbob (guest, #1770) [Link]

Have you ever been in a dentist's office, a hair salon, a dance studio, or a gym where there was music playing? Mightn't it make sense to centralize the music infrastructure onto the main file servers?

Oh, okay. It's probably for home users.

8TB NAS runs Linux

Posted Mar 27, 2009 23:55 UTC (Fri) by landman (subscriber, #2901) [Link]

As a vendor, building Linux based NAS/SAN/iSCSI systems, we are troubled by a supplier deciding to directly compete with us (and all the other folks who use Seagate drives for similar units).

This noted, someone mentioned wanting units running Debian (or Ubuntu). Our JackRabbit and ΔV units ship with Ubuntu 8.04 LTS by default (with our kernel), though we often get requirements for Redhat, SuSE and others. We do support these distributions.

Someone else asked about saturating a 100 Mbit link. Our JackRabbit unit has done a pretty good job saturating up to 10x 1 gigabit links, simultaneously, and we were showing off 500 MB/s sustained iSCSI bandwidth to disk over a single 10GbE link at SC08.

No iTunes tuner though ... sorry.