[BBLISA] Fileserver opinion

[Robert Keyes]

I don't like netapp. I had to deal with their products a few years ago in 
a combined linux/XP environment, and there were unsolveable problems. 
AFAIK, it related to the ownership and permissions that Linux users would 
see for files created in XP environment.

I then bought a generic PC motherboard and CPU, and a stack of SATA drives 
and set it up as RAID with LVM. This was kept on a UPS in an 
air-conditioned room. It worked well until something went wrong with the 
AC, and drives failed and the system shut down. I had a spare, and 
that was good, and the RAID helped, but after that I had two more drive 
failures within a month.

So the upshot of this is: don't let the AC fail. Or maybe, that you can't 
combine cheap hardware with an AC failure (the much hated netapp was in 
the same room and survived the heat).

I had a server, and HP LP1000R, that is built like a tank. Slow and old by 
today's stanards, being a dual Xenon at 1.27 Ghz, but it had 2GB of parity 
ram, and three 15K seagate SCSI3 (? I can't remember the SCSI tech for 
sure) drives, hot swappable, and I was able to get a fourth to swap. The 
problem is they were only 36GB each. Oh, the machine had a very complex 
hardware RAID, so I had two 36GB drives in one 72GB volume and a parity 
drive. This machine was great...it was very fast, very reliable...I mean 
very reliable. Even outside of AC and without a UPS it never had a single 
failure in the five years I had it in operation.

I wonder if it might be worthwhile getting a bunch of machines, perhaps 
not this old but using the best USED SCSI drives. These 
industrial-strength drives seems to be far better quality than the latest 
amazing capacity consumer drives. The disadvantages are going to be higher
electricity usage and taking more space.