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Media Hardware

Do-It-Yourself Fibre Channel Array 149

Posted by timothy from the woodscrews dept.
skarphedin writes "There's an interesting story here on a do-it-yourself fibre channel array. These guys make one for under $250 and it can perform up there with 15k SCSI in some cases." You know you want one.
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Do-It-Yourself Fibre Channel Array More

Do-It-Yourself Fibre Channel Array

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  • Here's another way (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 16, 2003 @05:56AM (#5523028)
    1) Buy a lot of fibre
    2) Fly to Folkestone, England
    3) Rent a sailboat
    4) Sail to Calais, France, laying an array of fibre behind you
    5) Congratulation on your Do-It-Yourself Fibre Channel Array.

  • Store already slashdotted (Score:3, Interesting)

    by tliet ( 167733 ) on Sunday March 16, 2003 @05:58AM (#5523031)
    It seems the links to the store selling the goodies is already slashdotted. The $40 a piece FC hostbus adapter [pricegrabber.com] page now shows $800 adapters, or a 100 pack for just over $60000. Beowulf anyone?

    • Re:Store already slashdotted (Score:4, Informative)

      by tigress ( 48157 ) <rot13.fcnzgenc03@8in.net> on Sunday March 16, 2003 @06:10AM (#5523054)
      Try eBay [ebay.com]. We got a QLogic 2100 (Copper) for $40. Drives can be found for $99 for a tenpack of 18.2GB Seagate 10k drives.

      • Re:Store already slashdotted (Score:1, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Are those drives really that worthless? I mean look at this
        http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewIte m&item =3406233779&category=11160

        Seems like they should cost much more. A small business say a video shop could build one hell of a server with those. I guess its just surprising that they don't cost a lot more than some of the IDE drives I see there. Do you think there just not reliable anymore?

        • Ask yourself, who buys Fibre Channel drives? Is it home users who need space for their mp3 and warez, or is it major corporations who need multi-terabyte storage for business-critical data?

          These big corporations used to buy hundreds, perhaps thousands of FC drives a few years ago. The drives back then were about 9 or 18 gigs in size, meaning that hundreds of drives were required for a sizeable array.

          Now (as we also discovered), hundreds of drives have several disadvantages. Not counting the physical space

  • Ewwwww. (Score:4, Funny)

    by Dr Tom Danger ( 621664 ) on Sunday March 16, 2003 @05:59AM (#5523033) Homepage
    Ug, a Compaq case? I've found there just isn't enough "Compaq sucks" propaganda on the web these days.

    But seriously, I bet if I wired this in my dorm room I could get some mean negative pings in UT '03. Kinda like a 'spider sense' for the pc.

  • No, I don't want one (Score:5, Interesting)

    by haggar ( 72771 ) on Sunday March 16, 2003 @06:00AM (#5523034) Homepage Journal
    I have used FC tech for several years. It's amazing technology, but performance is not it's main advantage. It's advantage is the possibility of stacking up incredible amounts of storage, with rendundant paths, at up to 100 m from the attachment point (one of the servers). This kind of environment is also very mindful of quality, and a self-made solution is not acceptable. Would you stack dozens of these self-made boxes and bet your career that they'll not fail. I know I wouldn't.

    On the other hand, if I just want performance, I will do better with SCSI, and even save some money.

    In this respect, I don't quite see what kind of niche would the solution in the article cover.

    • Re:No, I don't want one (Score:5, Funny)

      by smittyoneeach ( 243267 ) on Sunday March 16, 2003 @08:26AM (#5523199) Homepage Journal
      You raise an excellent QA point.
      Could become some major FUD, though, Elmer.
      You figure that your first outing or two might well have some flaws, and are certainly not ready for enterprise usage.
      So you get the hang of it on some little implementations before you go for a big one.
      Sort of the way you start up a little software test project and make sure you understand all of
      the header, object, and API issues for that shiny new library you just got off of SourceForge
      before you try to integrate something new with what you're _really_ working on.
      As a business strategy, FUD is great. If we can keep people convinced that they _can't_ do it themselves, they're more likely to hire us at phat consulting rates.

    • Re:No, I don't want one (Score:5, Insightful)

      by nolife ( 233813 ) on Sunday March 16, 2003 @02:16PM (#5524247) Homepage Journal
      There is always FUD associated with "Enterprise" class hardware and software. Some things really do need to perform at specific level or a baseline to run in this class, others do not but ride the coat tails of others that due for the exact reason you specify -- people do not want to bet their job on it, remember the old saying, you will never get fired for buying IBM.

      At work we decommisioned a large Compaq 2 year old server with a nice raid setup and SAN connectivity running Novell to make room for our MS takeover. The last job this server performed was storage to allow us to boot workstations with a network floppy and create and restore desktop images and for general storage in the IT department. It wasnt to bad but we never really achieved any more then 2-3MBytes/sec when transferring files to and from it. We did not have our new MS server to replace it yet so I took a small footprint Compaq P-III desktop with 512MB ram and loaded RH on it, slapped in an extra 7200rpm Maxtor 160GB IDE drive. Installed Samba, joined it to our W2K domain and it works great. We pull and store multiple images to the thing at roughly 5Mbyte/sec per PC and it has a sustained thoughput of about 10-12Mbyte/sec per HD or per network card (I have two NICs and you can select which one to use from the client boot disk when you connect. It also lets us burn DVD's directly from a Windows workstation at 2.4 speed (3.5Mbytes/sec) which our Novell server could never handle (many buffer underruns or had to transfer image file to the PC first).

      It does not have the redundancy of the old Novell server as I have a no raid setup but I back up the files using rsync to my other Linux machine on a daily basis and we have hundreds of other similar desktops I could grab parts from if needed. That desktop coast us about $600. that server was well over $5000.

      I guess the point is, it does not have to say "Enterprise", server, or cost a lot of money to perform the work you may need.

      The only other small problem is if I get hit by a bus they are screwed as the rest of the department has little interest in the headless Linux thing I have sitting on my desk. I am willing to explain it to anyone but being in a MS driven shop, so far only one person is interested. All they know is it currently works great.

      • Re:No, I don't want one (Score:3, Informative)

        by haggar ( 72771 )
        In a nutshell:
        - the disk setup is not rendundant
        - there is no documented disaster recovery plan

        Would you be so candid to tell me what kind of enterprise are you working for?
        • You have just commented on the exact point I was trying to make.
          Let me rephrase my first paragraph.. Basically it states some things should be enterprise level when required and it is nice to have a CYA backup when you get stumped. Not all things in an enterprise NEED to be at such a level.
          In my specific example, if all else fails, anyone in the office can crack out the DVD's and image the damn workstations manually if they wish.

    • From the Trenches (Score:3, Interesting)

      by LordMyren ( 15499 )
      Having built my own fiber channel backplanes based of a previously slashdot mentioned cinonic [cinonic.com] backplane, I agree, there are difficulties in setting up a fibre channel array. I got a db9-db9 cable and a hssdc-hssdc cable orgiinally, and ended up trying to solder them together. I'd never tried soldering shields together, and presumed it would take a while, but I kinda found out its pretty much impossible. So I just pulled on over the other and wire wrapped the hell out of it. I suspect its because of the
    • Having built my own fiber channel backplanes based of a previously slashdot mentioned cinonic [cinonic.com] backplane, I agree, there are difficulties in setting up a fibre channel array.

      I got a db9-db9 cable and a hssdc-hssdc cable orgiinally, and ended up trying to solder them together. I'd never tried soldering shields together, and presumed it would take a while, but I kinda found out its pretty much impossible. So I just pulled on over the other and wire wrapped the hell out of it.

      I suspect its because of the ca
    • dude, it's a "how-to" article, not a "preaching the merits of FC over SCSI." You've gotta understand something: people are going to want to find cheap alternatives for storage. this is simply a 'pointing the way to a watering hole' article, not the end-all, be-all of storage fantasies...
      • Um.. I wasn't "preaching", either. I think you have missunderstood my post, starting from the subject (which was a sort of reply to the comment to the article, not a reply to the article itself). I even addressed the point of cheap storage, and believe SCSI is cheaper than FC. Look, I'm not goin to repeat/explain my points, too late here, gotta sleep. Didn't mean to belittle the article.
        Cheers.

  • I dont quite get it (Score:5, Interesting)

    by watzinaneihm ( 627119 ) on Sunday March 16, 2003 @06:02AM (#5523038) Journal
    Fibre chanels I thought were used because
    1) Huge expansivity .
    2) Faster speeds, esp. over LAN (Storage area networks)
    Why would one want to use it in a home setup?
    You probably are not going to buy more than 3 or 4 Harddisks. I say if you want speed use more RAM(*though you wont get much for $250 * results might vary). If you want expansivity(not too much) and relatively fast (depends on a lot of stuff) access speeds and standards based setup, may I suggest iSCSI [digit-life.com]

    • Re:I dont quite get it (Score:5, Interesting)

      by tigress ( 48157 ) <rot13.fcnzgenc03@8in.net> on Sunday March 16, 2003 @06:29AM (#5523088)
      Why would one want to use it in a home setup?

      For the fun of doing it, for one thing. For instance, I have Token Ring, ATM and serial equipment in my home LAN. Why, when there is FE or even GigE? Because it's fun to play around with, and I learn a lot as well.

      Second, you might get pretty darn good performance out of a relatively cheap setup. Modern ATA-drives are pretty fast, but the problem is, there's just a single spindle. Random access will kill your drive. A home-built FC array for the price of an ATA-drive will get you perhaps five to ten separate drives. Mostly, these drives will be 10k drives as well (Almost all ATA-drives are 7.2k or less). The slightly higher rotation speed combined with the fact that you've got a large amount of individual spindles gives you much better random access. Also, remember that ATA usually is a huge CPU hog, which adds to the performance bottleneck.

    • I dunno where you buy RAM, but you can get 512 MB sticks of PC3100 for $120. Crucial, good stuff too. That's right about $250 for a gig of fast, stable RAM.

    • Re:I dont quite get it (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      There still are limits to the number of devices that can be attach at the OS level. Last time I checked, HPUX's limit was about 124 devices and Sun's limit was 256. Under 11.11, HP may have bumped that up a bit.

      And what good is mutliple fibre channels without EMC PowerPath for bandwidth balancing and failover?
    • Why would one want to use it in a home setup?

      Because slightly obsolete FC hardware is DIRT CHEAP on eBay [ebay.com]. That, and it's kind of fun to install some "enterprise level" hardware at home.
      • Ya know, we need to stop mentioning that very badly, because dirt cheap keeps getting less and less cheap as we drag more people over to dark ways.

        Supply remaining constant, demand increasing. Not cool.
    • because its cool

      oh, and amazing perforance for cheap from ebay. sure, there's huge startup costs, but storage from then on is neigh on free.

      Myren

  • How long you think... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by red5 ( 51324 ) <gired5@gmail . c om> on Sunday March 16, 2003 @06:05AM (#5523043) Homepage Journal
    How long do you think till the mac-heads credit apple with bring down the price of FC by including it in the X-raid? Just like they credited apple with bring down the price on SCSI, USB, etc.

    • Re:How long you think... (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I think the possibility of getting such cheap FC solution really goes to show how utterly overpriced apple is. Remember when the xserve raid came out, and the apple naysayers were all "You can't build something equivalent from standard parts for the price". That was just over a month ago. In one month, hobbyists have created a working solution that does what apple's does for nearly a tenth the cost. You can't argue with fast hard facts.

      • Apple's solution however doesn't involve blocks of wood next to high speed and therefore hot devices...

        It's also comparing Apples to oranges.. the Apple XServe RAID has an FC interface to the host controller, ie the XServe, but only uses ATA HDDs internally. Apple's is expensive, yes, but for 2.4TB, it's a pretty damn good price.
    • How long do you think till the mac-heads credit apple with bring down the price of FC by including it in the X-raid? Just like they credited apple with bring down the price on SCSI, USB, etc.

      Have SCSI prices come down? Hot damn. I'm off to get some of that SCSI gear. I've been waiting for this for years.

      Thanks Apple.

    • Gee... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Lysol ( 11150 )
      Has anyone looked at the prices from the story? I could not find a $25 FC drive anywhere. Cheapest was $120. So, yah, $240 for 2 drives, that kinda blows the under $250 out of the water.

      Anyway, being a 'mac head' and a 'linux head' and a 'computer head' in general, I don't necessairly get the orig posters issue. Apple does a lot of cool things. And some things just happen to hit the Mac market before the PC market. Big deal. Why not bitch about Billy G. then?

      My work has been setting up a FCA for the past
      • Has anyone looked at the prices from the story? I could not find a $25 FC drive anywhere. Cheapest was $120. So, yah, $240 for 2 drives, that kinda blows the under $250 out of the water.

        Yea, the $40.99 host is actually $858, pushing the whole project into the 'well over a grand' territory. I will blow 250 to enjoy working with a cool technology, even if i dont have an immediate need, but for a grand i can buy several nice u160 drives and stripe them since i dont 'need' FC.

        I found the whole article pret
      • Read the 2nd page of the article again..
        Below is the equipment list and prices that I compiled from 2 sources: sca40.com and Ebay
        I looked on eBay, and yeah, there is surplus stuff out there at those prices. The brand-new stuff is what you were finding prices for.

      • My work has been setting up a FCA for the past three weeks using Linux and there have been some major problems. They have a fat array with 32 15k rpm U320 drives hooked up to a IBM x440 via 4 HBAs. The interesting thing is that no distro they've tried can transfer faster than Windoze due to Linux kernel and driver issues. I was a little shoked. The x440 has 8 Xeons w/hyperthreading. The more cpus that are enabled, the more the performance degrades. The sysadmin says he thinks it has something to do with si

        • I went over to IBM's website and it sems to me that all the 6 PCI-X slots on these machines share the same bus, so it isn't going to matter if your kernel has multi-threaded I/O (is there such a thing?) or not.

          That is utterly wrong. If you look IBM's site [ibm.com], you'll see:

          Six Active(TM) PCI-X slots standard

          • Allows you to hot-add and hot-swap PCI and PCI-X adapters on the fly
          • The latest in PCI-X performance: 2 slots at 133 MHz, 2 slots at 100 MHz, and 2 slots at 66 MHz per chassis

          It's pretty obvious

      • The x440 has 8 Xeons w/hyperthreading. The more cpus that are enabled, the more the performance degrades. The sysadmin says he thinks it has something to do with single-threaded io calls in all Linux kernels - the more cpus try to access io, the more threads that get blocked. Me and the other sysadmin - Gentoo 'heads' - start scratching our heads wondering what all the Linux 'Enterprise' stuff is that everyone is talking about.

        The x440 is a NUMA machine. It takes special support added into the kernel to

  • Been there, almost done that... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by tigress ( 48157 ) <rot13.fcnzgenc03@8in.net> on Sunday March 16, 2003 @06:06AM (#5523045)
    We had great plans for building an FC array up until a while ago. For those who think FC is too expensive, take a look at this:

    180GB ATA drive: $200

    Qlogic FC host adapter: $40
    10 18GB 10k drives (eBay): $99
    10 T-cards: $50
    UTP-cable: $20
    --------------
    Total: $209

    Of course, there's the cost of running the array as well, which is the reason we never finished our project (We did get the hostadapter and built a couple of T-cards though). We calculated that our FC array would cost us an additional $2-300 in electricity every year. After getting hit with a $500 surprise electricity bill for our current equipment, we simply decided it wasn't worth it and got another IDE drive instead. Still, an interresting project. =)
    • I'd totally be all over a bit of homework and put something together like this, save for the fact that the last time I started putting components together my processor lit on fire. With that much cabling and harddrives I bet I could light 'em off like a pack of lady-fingers on the fourth of july.

      Who says electronics can't be fun...

    • noway can you get a host adapter for $40 - just about get a gigabit ethernet adapter for that but a fiberattached iSCSI card, naaa :. Shame the chap never realy check the prices with his pricewatch links/common sence $40, hehehe I wish, I can only wish.

      • Re:Been there, almost done that... (Score:5, Informative)

        by tigress ( 48157 ) <rot13.fcnzgenc03@8in.net> on Sunday March 16, 2003 @06:58AM (#5523115)
        Uhh, yes we DID get a host adapter for $40. =)

        QLogic 2100 copper, purchased on eBay for $32, shipping was about $8.

        Check it out yourself, there's some on there right now for less than $30.
        • ebay - hehe - I'll take your word for that as I cant find them, must be a new slashdot effect *shudders at prospect of story based ebay parts selling*. I assume all cheap ebay adapters have been purchased in preperation for artile DUP =).

          Still with cheap gigabit adapters available for new and the speed of fast IDE discs then I shant worry.

          Still your right with ebay part it CAN be done, so I stand corrected upon the question of the price; though still would like to see cheaper off the shelf parts. but it
        • Done any performance tests with your 2100?

          There's a reason why those cards that were $800 originally are only $40 now.

          The 2200s and 2300s are still expensive for a reason too.
          • No, we postponed our project due to electricity bill reasons. =)

            And yes, there is a reason for why those cards are available cheaply. It's called "Upgrading".

            The QLA 2100 is 1Gbps. Half duplex if I remember correctly. For modern FC Arrays, this is too slow. The QLA 2200 (1Gbps full duplex) and 2300 (2Gbps full duplex) are much more attractive, which is why they're still expensive. Big Corporations(tm) want to take advantage of the newer technology and upgrade to the newer standards. The older cards are re
    • Where did you find T-Cards for $5/ea? I've been looking for just a single one for the longest time, and they always seem to be at least $40/ea. So hard to find, in fact, that I'm working on designing and routing a 4-device FC backplane and just making them myself.
  • Have to be impressed with what was achieved there .. the usual story of a lot of spare parts, spare time and some good old human brainpower :) But the fairly intermittent results and usual dubious quality of the housing etc (due to your own competence) all say to me.. well its nice but why bother.. current ATA suits me just fine for now!
    • *sigh* geez...what do you want from me? a custom-fabricated aluminum housing coupled with an airbrush job that'd make Falcon-Northwest look like newbies? give me a break! It was fun, took me a few weeks, and gave me a better sense of what's out there....

  • File Locking (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rf0 ( 159958 ) <rghf@fsck.me.uk> on Sunday March 16, 2003 @06:16AM (#5523068) Homepage
    Yeah this is cool and such like but what if you want to mount it across two machine using two FCA's? You need software that allows file locking (such as SGI's CXFS) and that costs. Mind you if you only wanted it on one machine why not just buy a load of disks because in honesty when are you going to need such high amounts of bandwidth?

    Rus

  • SCA40 Backplanes (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Detritus ( 11846 ) on Sunday March 16, 2003 @06:20AM (#5523072) Homepage
    The drive mounting and enclosure was a bit of a kludge. Are there any reasonably priced boxes that you can install the drives in, with the correct mounting hardware and backplane?

    • Re:SCA40 Backplanes (Score:3, Informative)

      by mzito ( 5482 )
      You might want to look for Netapp FC(xx) disk shelves. They're normal hot-swap fibre channel JBODs. They're also very expensive, but if you get lucky you might see one sans drives and get it for much cheaper.

      Thanks,
      Matt
      • Plenty of the Netapp shelves out there, with and without drives. Heck, I've got a couple of extra shelves with no drives right now. Anyone want to buy one?

        I've been buying shelves filled with drives rather then just drives just because sometimes it's cheaper that way. You can get a shelf with 7 36 GB drives on the market for about $3-4K now. Of course, it helps if you also have a Netapp head... then you get their awesome file system, etc... as well. That's the best argument for not building your own to me.
    • card board box wouldnt do too bad considering he used wood to help mount the drives :)
      • LOL! dude, I had it, it was handy and i don't care.... now, I'm going to go back and replace the wood with 5/25" drive rails, but still, I've not heard any complaints from the drives yet.... :-)

  • Only external? (Score:5, Informative)

    by larien ( 5608 ) on Sunday March 16, 2003 @06:21AM (#5523073) Homepage Journal
    Since Fibre Channel is always found in external drive arrays
    Er, no, except perhaps in the Intel world. Sun certainly ships newer servers (280, 480, 880 & 1280) with FC internal disks. Their reason for that (given in their FAQ [sun.com] is that the arbitration for SCSI still takes place at the original 5MB/sec.

    • Re:Only external? (Score:4, Informative)

      by hbackert ( 45117 ) on Sunday March 16, 2003 @07:47AM (#5523163) Homepage

      Starting at Ultra320, Quick Arbitration is now available.

      Given that this is cutting edge of parallel SCSI, I can understand Sun to skip anything older. However I yet have to see a significant performance gain from going from U2W (80 MB/s) to FC. Arbitriation might be slower on U2W, but FC contains routing informations in each packet, which parallel SCSI lacks.

      Personally, I am very happy with the good old parallel SCSI. Even cutting edge drives like Cheetah 15k.3 are really fast, even when I cannot push them to their limit.

  • Article pages / project (Score:4, Funny)

    by walt-sjc ( 145127 ) on Sunday March 16, 2003 @06:22AM (#5523075)
    Is anyone as annoyed as I am about aticles spreat across 4376245 pages for no fucking reason? Page 2 for example (which is only 2 paragraphs of actual text) uses less than 50% of the page space! You have to scroll WAY past the end of the artlcle to even see all the ad's on the left column.

    I guess the fact that there is no normal "print version" link like MOST sites have is the most annoying. There is however a link to a PDF version [flickerdown.com] on the Very Last Page which helps, but html is much prefered.

    And what's with the wood blocks that looked like they were cut with a chain saw or hacked apart with an exacto blade? Ever hear of sheet metal? Hell, at LEAST pick up a used DRIVE case instead of a TAPE case. Even NEW they are pretty cheap.

    The CONCEPT of the project is interesting, but the implementation leaves MUCH to be desired.
    • Yeah, your site is so much better than mine is. You get slashdotted all the time.
      • Can you at least give a valid reason for the pagination rather than that a baseless comment (you know NOTHING about sites I run or what they can handle, which is MUCH more than slashdot subscribers could dish out...)
        • Yeah, after I digest your 2nd insult. We could put all the content on one page and that would do a great job of dragging the server down as everyone pulls everything. More than one page takes some pressure of the server. Regardless Dave put the article up, and he is new at this. I think you should cut him some slack, and not spout off insults because it is over the internet and not in person and you can.
          • My turn to digest what you just said. So it's LESS bandwidth to serve ONE request than 12? And how was my response an insult? It's just a fact. You know nothing about the sites I run.
          • Yeah, after I digest your 2nd insult.

            What insult? He merely asked you a question.

            We could put all the content on one page and that would do a great job of dragging the server down as everyone pulls everything. More than one page takes some pressure of the server.

            Now, *that* is an insult.

            Serving 12 pages with lots of ads is supposed to be less pressure than serving 1 modestly larger page?

        • More pages to put ads on I would guess.

          The ads totally invalidate any "concerns about bandwith" arguments. Two paragraphs of text or 30 paragraphs of text are going to be way less than even a couple image ads.

          So, it's the ads. The pages were broken up to fit more ads.
          • ermmm..no? I broke the pages up based on what I thought were logical breaks in the content. I could care less about the ads. I write for the sheer joy of it and I don't get paid for it. So, please, talk to the author (that'd be me) before you go on spouting tripe you know absolutely nothing about... cheers, dave
        • hey...as the article's author, I think I can offer my rationale for the pagination...(as I have 15 other places on this thread)... 1.) I'm provided a CMS framework in which to break up my article. The ads are provided by the processes that AMDZone runs, not by my pagination. 2.) I originally wrote the story up in M$ Word (don't shoot me...I'm running openoffice too...) for future placement into PDF format 3.) I tried to decide how best to break the article up...I divided this by thought process... 4.) At
      • You have no idea what a high traffic website is. None. I work on the IT staff of a certain Fortune 100 company, and I can tell you that
        1. Slashdot traffic (forget about just link clickthroughs) is piddly compared to what we see on a regular basis (you should've seen the logs on Superbowl Sunday!). Slashdot is not special. You are not special.
        2. We have a business model more concrete and certainly less offensive than "throw up 20 obnoxious banners and make readers look at things 2 paragraphs at a time".
        3. Y

  • from the.... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 16, 2003 @06:26AM (#5523081)
    ...porn storage at the speed of light department

  • Why shouldn't it? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by shoppa ( 464619 ) on Sunday March 16, 2003 @07:33AM (#5523152)
    it can perform up there with 15k SCSI in some cases

    Why should this be surprising? FC drives are in every single case SCSI drives with a different, more expensive, interface. Although they tend to be cheaper on the surplus market, which I think is the *real* point.

  • Wood?!?! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by KingDaveRa ( 620784 ) on Sunday March 16, 2003 @07:38AM (#5523156) Homepage
    So, he says the the drives get really hot, so he drills a load of holes for ventilation.

    Then he goes and mounts them in the case with wood!! Why? Its an insulator!!! Ok, maybe he didn't have the necessary metal skills (or equipment even) to make a custom bracket, but using wood to mount a drive just seems a bit dangerous to me.

    • and then he could have wrapped it in foam rubber because they where "loud" hehe :)
      • Why not go all the way and lock it in a cupboard, solves all the problems then!
        • why stop there? I had the idea, long ago, of building a computer inside a refrigerator, with sealed holes for the wires to connect to the interface devices (this was before i heard of refrigerated cases)
          • Nah. Been done. I remember a site, cult of the llama or something they were called, i forget, anyway, they did it. I think it may have been a faked thing just for laughs.

            Still, its a good idea.

    • gee, thanks! love your work too... actually, my drives are running rather cool (thanks for asking)...The ventilation holes provide a passive means of cooling. If heat rise, it needs a means to escape. The drives aren't loud and frankly, I could care less... repeat after me: It was a fun project...

  • a Hoax story (Score:3, Interesting)

    by stock ( 129999 ) <stock@stokkie.net> on Sunday March 16, 2003 @08:28AM (#5523201) Homepage
    When i follow the links for the prices of his used components i get the following :
    • 18.4GB Fibre Channel 3.5LP 10K RPM 25.4MM (Hitachi) - (DK32CJ18FC) $119.00
    • QLA2100/66 64bit PCI FC Host Adpt COPP w/Cab (Qlogic) - (QLA210066) $858.20
    So where did he get those goodies? Ohh! he was just good buddies with a ex- Enterprise storage Admin?

    Robert

    • got them off of Ebay...the store that routinely sells the drives for extremely cheap is HDOutlet. (look 'em up...) As for the HBA, I can't remember where I got it, but several on ebay this past weekend were going for 35.00 cheers, dave

  • What a waste (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 16, 2003 @09:25AM (#5523273)
    Why put all of 2 disks into an ugly assed old compaq case with those shady adapters when you can go buy a used 11,14 or 22 disk fibre-channel array with redundant power and dual loops made by a certain manufacturer (hey I ain't givin up all my secrets) for well less than $500 empty and around $650 with ~180GB 10K disks in it?! And yes of course they do make FC cards with internal adapters on them too. Here's a hint: SENA. As for FC not having performance, all I can say is 'HUH?!' I'll take a single 1gbps loop over scsi320 parallel or whatever they're calling it any day. Beyond my own benchmarking FC devices, if SCSI were better/faster don't you think people like EMC, HDS and Compaq (believe it or not Compaq makes some pretty kickin arrays) would still use SCSI back ends or even front ends on their storage products? For years EMC has been slammed about using SCSI back ends in their arrays and finally have FC throughout the machines. FC is saweeet and it runs SCSI above the FC layer as well. It can also run other protocols like IP but I've yet to see that implemented well.
    • I'll second those sentiments regarding Compaq's StorageWorks line. They might not yet be able to compete with EMC and HDS on the enterprise level, but their midrange stuff can compete with anybody when comparing best bang for the buck. Their Enterprise Virtual ArrayAnd you're killing me with your SENA hint. I've been dying to find some FC hardware to play with at home, but am not finding any cheap sources for SENA hardware.

  • SCSI vs. Fiber Channel (Score:5, Informative)

    by snowtigger ( 204757 ) on Sunday March 16, 2003 @09:45AM (#5523318) Homepage
    Where I used to work, we had a few Sun servers with FC disk arrays.

    Here's the Sun engineer's explanation of why FC is so interesting for servers:

    1) The FC protocol has a 100MByte/s dedicated bandwidth to data. The communication between disks etc. will not interfer with this bandwidth.

    2) Modern SCSI has two modes: one for data (burst mode) and one communication mode. The communication mode is a lot slower (first scsi standard) in order to remain compatible with older disks. This means that scsi is a lot more advantageous to users reading large files than small files.

    This is where FC becomes interesting: If you have a striped disk array, you will read many small segments from different disks instead of large segments from single disks. In this special case, FC is faster than SCSI, even though it is "slower" by looking at the burst rates in the specs.
    • If you have a striped disk array, you will read many small segments from different disks instead of large segments from single disks. In this special case, FC is faster than SCSI, even though it is "slower" by looking at the burst rates in the specs.

      Uhhh, that's called RAID, and you can do it without FC. You can do RAID striping with IDE or SCSI hard drives that outperform a single SCSI drive.
      • You're missing the point.

        Of course you can do raid with ide, scsi or whatever that outperforms a single disk. However, all disks sharing a bus also shares the total bandwidth of that bus.

        What I'm trying to say is that when you have a stripe (=raid 0 or 0+1), FC is faster than SCSI because of the way the communication protocols work.

  • Nice But ...... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Quietlife2k ( 612005 )
    Anyone seen ide to fibre channel convertors ? Before you flame - They DO exist this product has them in it see here :- http://www.axus.com.tw/br1200fc.htm Anyone seen single drive versions of this ?

  • I built a FC array last year... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by nuxx ( 10153 ) on Sunday March 16, 2003 @12:09PM (#5523674) Homepage
    I made a Fibre Channel array like this last year. The only difference being that I used a Mylex [mylex.com] eXtremeRAID 3000 [mylex.com] (eBay for $200), a 256MB Crucial DIMM for cache, and four Seagate [seagate.com] ST39102FC [seagate.com] 9GB 10,000 RPM disks.

    My whole point to the project was EXTREMELY fast disk access (up to ~160MB/sec sustained transfers, see here [nuxx.net]) that I could locate at the far end of a REALLY long cable. I've got my machine in my office and the hard drives on the other end of a 30m cable, nestled nicely down in the basement where I cannot hear it.

    There are a few basic pictures of the external assembly available here [nuxx.net]. Works really, really well. It's amazing what hugely fast disk IO does for the rest of a machine.
  • FibreChannel has has a 2Gb mode for at least a year now with products from many vendors.
  • Aside from being a whiny prick that tried to cause trouble for competing fibre channel product vendors on Ebay, Sanden Fuess's products [sca40.com] are designed so far out of spec it's sad. They may be cute as a hand assembled hacker novelty, but I'd never put them into any type of production environment.

    General rule: If it doesn't AC decouple and doesn't actively terminate, or it does not use 0603 or *smaller* surface mount components, don't buy it. And, if it doesn't use shielded cables, laugh at the vendor! If any

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