VIA has just released a new low power motherboard called the NAS7800 with a C7 1.5ghz, 8 SATA ports, dual gig LAN, CF slot and more... This is the ideal platform for low power embedded storage, 8x 1.5 tb drives could yield a great high performace RAID6 system with 9 terrabytes of capacity. So unfortunate it sells for $550, and currently with a minimum order of 500 pieces with no distributors willing to pick it up.
Next up, we have new appliances from QNAP that uses the ultra-efficient Intel Atom to perform RAID on up to 6 sata drives (+2 esata), with 2 Gig LAN, 5 USB ports all in a nice shiny case. While at nearly $2k it does not come with drives, the features 
are extremely rich.
- Online capacity expansion/migration
- RAID 0,1,5,6, 5+spare
- Dual OS on flash - if one fails, the other takes over
- Rich addon apps like Joomla, MySQL, backup suites, IP Cam DVR
- Click here for more
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I also came across this interesting item today - Port Mutlipliers for SATA - convert a single
SATA port into several - however the SATA interface must support FIS switching for port multipliers, for instance the Adaptec 1430SA (or also Marvell 88SX7042) is a 4 port SATA RAID card that can be expanded by these port multipliers to 20 port RAID card and still maintain wire speed on all channels. These are quite diverse devices with support for internal expansion or eSATA expansion - for instance the device pictured can be installed in an external enclosure and plugged into a single eSATA port on your PC to add 5 external drives.
On to other items - NAS/RAID softwares:
FlexRAID is a new file system simulating RAID type features with many advantages and without the RAID card. It perform software parity on your data to prevent data loss in case of a drive failure much similar to RAID5, but unlike RAID5 where if a 2nd drive fails the whole array of data is lost, FlexRAID only looses the data on that lost drive, all other drives remain available for access. FlexRAID also offers automatic rebuilding to spares, use if non-similar disks and much more. Drivers are available for both Windows and *nix.
Another interesting NAS OS I have found is called UnRAID, which is mainly aimed at home based users looking to archive movies. Unraid uses many features of FlexRAID in that its all software based, and different drives can be used, and data loss is minimal in the event that more than 1 drive fails. It has free/paid licensing tiers which are quite reasonable, the free version handling 3 drives, and the 'PRO' version handling up to 21 drives. It has been stated this is not for everyone, the system is reasonably fast, but definitely lacks the speed available to true hardware based RAID/NAS systems.
If you missed this other article on Openfiler, you might also check that out for a NAS OS.
No comments:
Post a Comment