Today’s annoying discoveries
(a) Nobody seems to make an affordable SATA-to-USB2/Firewire disk enclosure that does more than two disks;
(b) So the best you can do at the “I am not spending stupid amounts of money” end of the spectrum is mirrored disk, which is kinda wasteful — I’d rather buy three disks and get the capacity of two than buy two and get the capacity of one;
(c) OS X doesn’t appear to do software RAID5 at all, so even if I bought a couple of two-disk JBOD enclosures it wouldn’t help (and ZFS is still a year or more away!). This is particularly stupid given the number of disks a Mac Pro can take;
(d) For bonus points, my usual suspects at least don’t seem to stock any SATA-to-Firewire boxes, it’s all USB2/eSATA now. They do have some PATA-to-Firewire units but that’s pretty useless unless you’re recycling old drives;
(e) Not having a lot of luck figuring out when to expect Nehalem chips to hit the market. Am horribly tempted by a new iMac but with Nehalem possibly ~6 months away that seems like a bonehead move right now.
(Don’t talk to me about Linux or Solaris or FreeBSD or whatever. This particular line of irritation comes from having had the bright idea that one could probably just get the storage I want relatively cheaply by tacking it on the back of the above hypothetical iMac.)
Popularity: 29% [?]
http://www.drobostore.com/storefront/part/technotes.do?skuNo=2198563
Drobo is heading toward “stupidly expensive”. You can buy a 2-disk RAID0/1 enclosure for ~AU$150, I’d expect to pay no more than AU$300 for something that takes three or four disks and does RAID5 on them.
For the money they’re asking — Streetwise has them for AU$649 at the moment, which is the cheapest I’ve seen in a while — I expect NAS functionality as well. Which is another AU$300 on Drobo…
The price difference between RAID 0/1 and RAID 5 is a lot of stock SATA chipsets implement RAID0/1 (It’s easy) whereas RAID5 requires processing (more bits, the bits cost more than 20 cents).
Despite looking at ‘Drobo’ I can’t quite see where the point is, especially given $649+$300 apparently gets you a NAS box without any spindles yet.
The appeal of Drobo is that a RAID5-ish box costs about that sort of money anyway. The target market is people who find computer acronyms scary, or those who want to just plug the thing in and have it work with no further effort required.
If you happen to stumble upon something that takes two or more SATA disks, and presents them as single disks to the OS, please let me know (my main gripe is with the gazillion of shitty power supplies that go along with the single-disk enclosures, and I can live with lots of USB cables - the RAID part’s much easier handled within the OS IMHO).
cheers
I was looking at something like this from Vantec. Takes a pair of SATA disks, presents them as a JBOD. Figured two of these, software RAID5, all good. Well, a bit slow, but otherwise good.
MacOS X Server has no trouble doing RAID5 in software–I’ve used it myself. I dunno if that’s something they disable for the plebe version though.
Just checked it at work to be sure: mirror, stripe, or concat. No other options on the client version of the OS.
But where’s the fibre channel?