# Computer storage survey OCT 2010



## lockfile (Oct 23, 2010)

What storage drives do you guys have? Currently I have a small and slow 5.4k/rpm drive in my netbook and an external Maxtor HD. In the future I plan on getting two internal HDs for RAID 0 @ 7200 when I build a dual core system. The netbook is proving quite claustrophobic. I'm not joining the SSD bandwagon just yet.


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## davetrotteruk (Oct 23, 2010)

3 HDs all 7200rpm. 1TB, 500GB, 250GB. I did have a 150GB one as well but my girlfriends HD broke so I gave her one of mine.
I running my main OS on the 250GB with zfs and my /home on the other two concatenated with zfs.


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## lockfile (Oct 28, 2010)

I still haven't tried the ZFS yet. I hear too many horror stories about ZFS being a RAM hog. UFS is so old that it's better than some of the new stuff.


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## shitson (Oct 28, 2010)

lockfile said:
			
		

> I still haven't tried the ZFS yet. I hear too many horror stories about ZFS being a RAM hog. UFS is so old that it's better than some of the new stuff.



Please take what you hear about certain things with a grain of salt. ZFS is a memory hog for a reason. It will use memory in order to prevent the need for constant disk access i/o meaning that in certain caches you wont even touch the disk for a read operation. It is always looking at giving memory back to the OS if required. 

You can also tune these parameters too.. Please have a closer look into it before you dismiss ZFS...


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## tingo (Oct 29, 2010)

I'm with shitson here. I've had a zfs file server (4 GB RAM) running for almost 11 months now, and the zfs part of it has been very robust, stable and easy to manage.


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## Pushrod (Nov 4, 2010)

```
ad0: 114473MB <WDC WD1200JB-00DUA3 75.13B75> at ata0-master UDMA100
ad1: 305245MB <WDC WD3200JB-22KFA0 08.05J08> at ata0-slave UDMA100
ad4: 1907729MB <WDC WD20EARS-00J2GB0 80.00A80> at ata2-master UDMA100 SATA 3Gb/s
ad6: 953869MB <WDC WD10EADS-00L5B1 01.01A01> at ata3-master UDMA100 SATA 3Gb/s
ad8: 1430799MB <WDC WD15EADS-00P8B0 01.00A01> at ata4-master UDMA100 SATA 3Gb/s
ad10: 953869MB <WDC WD10EADS-00M2B0 01.00A01> at ata5-master UDMA100 SATA 3Gb/s
ad12: 238475MB <WDC WD2500JB-00GVA0 08.02D08> at ata6-master UDMA100
ad13: 238475MB <WDC WD2500JB-00GVA0 08.02D08> at ata6-slave UDMA100
```

I blame Bram Cohen for my disk space requirements.


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## Zhwazi (Nov 5, 2010)

I have a little atom D510 box with two 7200RPM 2TB hitachi disks mirrored with ZFS. My main desktop also has a pair of Samsung 1TB disks mirrored with ZFS and a 500G for Windows for what little gaming I do.


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## lockfile (Nov 20, 2010)

UPDATE: I bought a used system. Workstation class P4 system. Black Friday is in a week! 

3ghz HT Pentium 4, 6.4GB/s of 2GB of RAM, 1 750gb and 1 250gb drives 7.2k rpm drives. These things are not SSDs but they are fast. I'm not on the SSD train. Regular disks are still meeting my needs and exceeding them.


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## Terry_Kennedy (Nov 27, 2010)

lockfile said:
			
		

> What storage drives do you guys have?


Here's a partial view of mine:

```
(0:16) new-gate:/tmp# df -h
Filesystem            Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/da0s1a           3.9G    477M    3.1G    13%    /
devfs                 1.0K    1.0K      0B   100%    /dev
/dev/da0s1d           127G     10G    106G     9%    /var
/dev/da0s1e            31G    6.0K     29G     0%    /var/crash
/dev/da0s1f            31G    4.5G     24G    16%    /usr
/dev/da0s1g            31G     18K     29G     0%    /tmp
/dev/da0s1h            31G    489M     28G     2%    /sysprog
procfs                4.0K    4.0K      0B   100%    /proc
server:/anonymous     137G    117G     20G    85%    /var/www/docs/ftp
server:/infozip       137G    117G     20G    85%    /var/www/docs/infozip
devfs                 1.0K    1.0K      0B   100%    /var/named/dev
rz1:/data              21T    7.8T     14T    36%    /var/www/docs/media/data1
rz1m:/data             21T    8.1T     13T    38%    /var/www/docs/media/data1m
rz2:/data              21T    7.8T     14T    36%    /var/www/docs/media/data2
```
Yup, the bottom 3 filesystems add up to 63 terabytes. Raw is 96TB (48 2TB WD2003FYYS RE4 drives), with spares and raidz consuming the difference. And all of this stuff is in my house - good in the winter, not so good in the summer. The infozip mount point is ftp://ftp.info-zip.org/pub/infozip, which is one of a number of storage / bandwidth favors I'm doing for various friends.


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## lockfile (Nov 27, 2010)

Sweet. What kind of chasis are you using to hold all those drives, server box, NAS box, or a really large ATX case...?




			
				Terry_Kennedy said:
			
		

> Here's a partial view of mine:
> 
> ```
> (0:16) new-gate:/tmp# df -h
> ...


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## Terry_Kennedy (Nov 27, 2010)

lockfile said:
			
		

> Sweet. What kind of chasis are you using to hold all those drives, server box, NAS box, or a really large ATX case...?


A custom version of the CI Design NSR 316. Dual Xeon E5520 CPUs, 48GB RAM, Supermicro X8DTH-iF motherboard. Separate gmirror'd WD3200BEKT drives for the OS. 256GB PCI-E SSD for ZFS intent log.

You can see a discussion of my previous-generation (6TB) units here.

Here is what is in the current-generation units. Here is a case of 2TB RE4 drives.

Update: This is a view of two of the servers racked and running. The green LEDs in the drive bays are "Drive present and OK", blue is activity, and red (not lit) indicates faults by different blink codes. The top-right drive has no activity because it is the hot spare.


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## lockfile (Nov 29, 2010)

Hey Kennedy, you could be a one man startup with all that storage!


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## roddierod (Nov 29, 2010)

```
ad8: 476940MB <MAXTOR STM3500630AS 3.AAE> at ata4-master UDMA100 SATA 1.5Gb/s
ad10: 76319MB <Seagate ST380013AS 3.05> at ata5-master UDMA100 SATA 1.5Gb/s
ad18: 953869MB <Seagate ST31000528AS CC3E> at ata9-master UDMA100 SATA 3Gb/s
da0 at mpt0 bus 0 scbus0 target 15 lun 0
da0: <FUJITSU MAU3073NP 0104> Fixed Direct Access SCSI-3 device
da0: 320.000MB/s transfers (160.000MHz, offset 127, 16bit)
da0: Command Queueing enabled
da0: 70136MB (143638992 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 8941C)
da1 at mpt1 bus 0 scbus1 target 3 lun 0
da1: <FUJITSU MAP3147NP 5608> Fixed Direct Access SCSI-3 device
da1: 320.000MB/s transfers (160.000MHz, offset 127, 16bit)
da1: Command Queueing enabled
da1: 140014MB (286749480 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 17849C)
```


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## vermaden (Nov 29, 2010)

```
newsrv # [color="#0000ff"][B]camcontrol devlist[/B][/color]
<ST32000542AS CC34>                at scbus0 target 0 lun 0 (pass0,ada0) [color="Gray"]// 2TB Seagate LP[/color]
<ST32000542AS CC34>                at scbus1 target 0 lun 0 (pass1,ada1) [color="#808080"]// 2TB Seagate LP[/color]
<WD My Passport 070A 2003>         at scbus3 target 0 lun 0 (da0,pass2)  [color="#808080"]// 1TB WD Passport USB[/color]

newsrv # [color="Blue"][B]atacontrol list[/B][/color]
ATA channel 0:
    Master:  ad0 <ELITE PRO CF CARD 8GB/Ver2.19K> ATA/ATAPI revision 0   [color="#808080"]// 8GB Kingston CompactFlash[/color]
    Slave:       no device present

oldsrv # [color="#0000ff"][B]camcontrol devlist[/B][/color]
<SAMSUNG HD103SJ 1AJ100E4>         at scbus0 target 0 lun 0 (pass0,ada0) [color="#808080"]// 1TB Samsung F3[/color]
<SAMSUNG HD103SJ 1AJ100E4>         at scbus1 target 0 lun 0 (pass1,ada1) [color="#808080"]// 1TB Samsung F3[/color]
<SAMSUNG HD103SJ 1AJ100E4>         at scbus2 target 0 lun 0 (pass2,ada2) [color="#808080"]// 1TB Samsung F3[/color]
<Kingston DataTraveler 2.0 1.00>   at scbus6 target 0 lun 0 (da0,pass4)  [color="#808080"]// 16GB Kingston Pendrive USB[/color]
<WD My Passport 071A 2011>         at scbus7 target 0 lun 0 (da1,pass5)  [color="#808080"]// 1TB WD Passport USB[/color]

laptop # [color="#0000ff"][B]camcontrol devlist[/B][/color]
<INTEL SSDSA2M160G2GC 2CV102HD>    at scbus0 target 0 lun 0 (pass0,ada0) [color="#808080"]// 160GB Intel SSD[/color]
```


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## Terry_Kennedy (Nov 30, 2010)

lockfile said:
			
		

> Hey Kennedy, you could be a one man startup with all that storage!


Been there, did that, traded the company for the proverbial "suitcases full of $100 bills". These days, this is just for fun.


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## vinhsynd (Dec 6, 2010)

I have 2 1TB EADS drives in an Atom 330/Ion running FreeNAS. 
The case is a nice little lian li that will hold 6 drives, so I can expand later.
I have not read enough about ZFS to use it - so I'm using geom_vinium with UFS.


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## Terry_Kennedy (Dec 7, 2010)

vinhsynd said:
			
		

> I have not read enough about ZFS to use it - so I'm using geom_vinium with UFS.


For a 2-drive system ZFS might be overkill for you. But when you get to larger numbers of drives, ZFS really performs well. I never used it before I set up the servers I posted about above. There are lots of good tutorials on the 'net. Plus, I did my own tests of pulling drives and so forth to get personal experience with ZFS recovery.

The only negative with ZFS is that there isn't a free native backup application - lots of people seem convinced that ZFS shapshots and/or send/receive are the answer to all ZFS backup questions.


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