# Nearline storage?



## BlueCoder (Jul 26, 2014)

Not FreeBSD specific but does anyone know of any open source "nearline" storage solutions?

With nearline I'm specifically thinking of hard drives that turn on and off and smart caching.

ZFS is wonderful and all but I only need so many available terabytes of storage to be available. I archive a lot of the data that simply doesn't need to be immediately available. I image DVD's and data CD and so have lots of ISO images. And I do backups. But these drives simply don't need to be on all the time. I personally think turning on and off secondary file servers to be a bit of a chore.  An automated caching system would be nice. And if it has some redundancy then all the better.


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## bthomson (Jul 27, 2014)

I spent a week researching this a couple years ago, but gave up and went to a 2-server solution.

My requirements were a bit different from yours, though: it had to be FreeBSD-based and I wanted to minimize power consumption of the always-online system. With FreeBSD I could suspend the unused disks down to only about 0.5 W each but the MPS IO cards were a different story (FreeBSD driver problems or perhaps just my own lack of skill?). Anyway, you might have more luck with a Linux system there.


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## jalla (Jul 28, 2014)

BlueCoder said:
			
		

> NI personally think turning on and off secondary file servers to be a bit of a chore.


Don't overestimate the problem of turning on/off a backupserver, it's easily done with a remote controlled power plug.

I have a USB stick from Telldus http://www.telldus.se/products/tellstick. Using this I have a fully automated setup (a script running from crontab) that turns on my backup server once per day, run backups of all my machines, and then turns the server off again.


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## wblock@ (Jul 29, 2014)

Even easier with WoL.  Enable it on the NAS.  Boot the NAS into FreeBSD once after power is applied.  At that point, it can be shut down remotely from an SSH connection, and powered up with wake(8).


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## vermaden (Jul 29, 2014)

@@BlueCoder

Nearline SAS is nothing more th_a_n a 5400/5900/7200 SATA drive with SAS connector instead of the SATA one, but they cannot say a 'SATA drive with SAS connector' so they 'invented' the Nearline SAS term.


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## usdmatt (Jul 29, 2014)

@@vermaden

That was my initial thought when seeing the title of the post. However there appears to be a difference between "Nearline storage" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nearline_storage), which this post is about, and "Nearline SAS" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_att ... arline_SAS).


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## vermaden (Jul 30, 2014)

@usdmatt, you are right, thanks.


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