[Interest check] low-cost XScale 4 port S-ATA NAS/router

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Originally Posted by msa1500

Mean Time Between Failure :

It all has something to do with statistics , this number gives you an idea how long a component will function without failure.
But theres more :

Lets say i have a disk with a mtbf of 1000000 hours.
so when i hook up one such disk theres a high probablity that the disk will fail within 1 mil hours. (99.8%). But when i hook up 200 disks within one array. The array will have a mtbf of 1000000/200 = 5000 hours , so there's a high probability that one disk will fail within 5000 hours of operation (99.8 % )

This is all to give you an impression what this mtbf means.
It doesnt mean that a disk will actually fail within 5000 hours.

Greetz

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I know you're a professional storage guy, but IDE (P-ATA and S-ATA) are so common to run 24/7 these days. 99% of the home users who have a box running 24/7 use IDE and lots of the smaller and mid-size companies heavilly depend on IDE as well. I am aware of the MBTF term and what it means, but I've seen more then my share of (nearly brand-new) SCSI harddisks failures. Especially accounting the 'fact' that SCSI is professional and IDE disks are not...

Anyway, a S-ATA RAID-5 array using 4 disks provides (on a small network) the same performance with much larger capacities for a significant lower price with practically the same data integrity ratio.

So SCSI is hardly an interesting product here. Unless you can deliver me a 1 TB SCSI NAS device for EUR. 800,-- ofcourse :D

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Originally Posted by Styno

I know you're a professional storage guy, but IDE (P-ATA and S-ATA) are so common to run 24/7 these days. 99% of the home users who have a box running 24/7 use IDE and lots of the smaller and mid-size companies heavilly depend on IDE as well. I am aware of the MBTF term and what it means, but I've seen more then my share of (nearly brand-new) SCSI harddisks failures. Especially accounting the 'fact' that SCSI is professional and IDE disks are not...

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I have a question on the WL-700g:

1. Will this model have a 1.1 or a 2.0 USB port?
2. The most important question for me: will it be possible to use the
WL-700g without inserting any internal hard drive but connecting
instead an external USB hard drive (I already have an external 2.5" HD
and would like to save money not buying a HD to insert inside)?

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Originally Posted by hiall

I have a question on the WL-700g:

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don't discuss it here

see specs: https://wl500g.info/showthread.php?t=2049
All we know about it is there

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Originally Posted by Styno

I know you're a professional storage guy,

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You know me then ??????????

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Styno

but IDE (P-ATA and S-ATA) are so common to run 24/7 these days. 99% of the home users who have a box running 24/7 use IDE and lots of the smaller and mid-size companies heavilly depend on IDE as well. I am aware of the MBTF term and what it means, but I've seen more then my share of (nearly brand-new) SCSI harddisks failures. Especially accounting the 'fact' that SCSI is professional and IDE disks are not...

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Yes true but the fun part of this all is you normally can replace the disks under warranty :)

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Originally Posted by Styno

Anyway, a S-ATA RAID-5 array using 4 disks provides (on a small network) the same performance with much larger capacities for a significant lower price with practically the same data integrity ratio.

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But using SCSI as your storage in Raid 5 (or whatever) will result in a much lower serverload then typical PATA or SATA.

Sorry guys but this is more or less off-topic. Im a bit of a storage addict.

Cheers

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Originally Posted by msa1500

You know me then ??????????

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Be careful what you say about yourself ;)

I saw this post in another thread:

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Originally Posted by msa1500

Currently testing a new iSCSI box (will be released somewhere 2nd half of this year) (Doing that as a part of my job)

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Thanks for explaining me what MTBF is :)

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Originally Posted by tophinus

Thanks for explaining me what MTBF is :)

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Meaningless Time Between Failure
:rolleyes:

A little update for this topic.

I'm still very interested in a high end, "more capable", NAS device. As Team-ASA is not willing to ship less then 100 pieces at once, and interest of other people is not what I hoped for, I am giving my hope to get one of these devices up.

So I've started to look elsewhere and compiled a list of interesting devices: High end NAS comparison.

Of the current "capable" devices, the Infrant ReadyNAS X6 is the most interesing because of it's well tuned firmware and good performance. However, this device is rather costly in Europe as one has to pay 460 GBP (around 680 Euro) for a barebone version (no harddisks): http://www.eaegis.net/.

Apart from the ReadyNAS, the Newisys NA-1400 is a promising product, but it's not available yet. Let it be marketing blabla, but Newisys promises "best of class" performance and reports up to 22 MB/s performance on it's website. This brings it roughly up to par with the ReadyNAS but will cost significantly less: 400 to 500 Euro for a barebone version. Besides the two gigabit ports and hot-swap harddisks, this is the major reason for me to buy a Newisys NA-1400. In anticipation of this device being shipped (Newisys promised shipment around the end of October), I've started an wl-500g.info like site: http://www.na1400.info

I hope to see you there sometime and maybe you can tell me what you think about it.

Edit: updated the excl. FAT price of the ReadyNAS to incl. FAT

Styno, are you familiar with Via Epia boards?
they have a lot of models, some have dual ethernet connectors + ide, but they may be a bit hard to find at your "regular" store...
they'r about 100eur(?)

http://www.viavpsd.com/product/epia_...herboardId=181
http://www.techcase.de/index.php?cPath=91

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Originally Posted by gwl

Styno, are you familiar with Via Epia boards?
they have a lot of models, some have dual ethernet connectors + ide, but they may be a bit hard to find at your "regular" store...

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Yep I am, that's why I don't want one of those... :)

Let's compare a VIA solution to a commercial solution like the Newisys NA-1400 or Infrant ReadyNAS X6:
- Via NIC's are rarely capable of transmitting more then 6 MB/s and require a lot of CPU power at the same time. Also the more capable versions (e.g. 1 GHz Nemehia) require half as much power as an ordinary PIII @ 1GHz, but perform also roughly like a PIII-500. An Intel XScale I/O Processor consumes around 2 Watt.

- Getting a VIA board to do RAID-5 with 4 harddisks requires an extra PCI card. You also need an extra gigabit network card (or two), so the two (or three) devices are struggling with eachother for the scarse bandwith of a single PCI bus. When using software raid you rely heavilly on the CPU which results in poor performance on a VIA CPU. So one should result to a hardware RAID controller with onboard XOR engine (Like the Broadcom RAIDCore BCxxx series). But those are expensive.

- The next problem is to find a suitable SFF case and hot-swap drive bays to house everything in.

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they'r about 100eur(?)

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Component costs (checked with a Dutch pricewatch site):
- VIA board: at least 100 EUR (more likely 150+).
- 256 MB RAM: 20 EUR.
- SATA controller: 100 EUR.
- SATA hotswap backplane for 4 harddisks: 100 EUR.
- PCI Gigabit adapter: 40 EUR.
- PCI Riser card (to place 2 PCI cards): 20 EUR.
- Housing: at least 70 EUR.
- Power supply: 50 EUR.
- Boot flash: 10 EUR.
=====================+
Total: 510 EUR minimum.

So, compared to the Newisys NA-1400 a VIA based solution isn't all that cheap.

I allready have a PIII Celeron 1 GHz network server with 100 Mbit network, but I want to replace it with a faster and more power efficient solution as the server is active 24/7. That's why I'm not going for a VIA based solution.

Edit: Forgot a power supply :)