Archive for the 'hardware' Category

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Best way to store one terabyte?

Published on August 26, 2006 in hardware. 6 Comments

Petabox - 100TB in a rack
I’ve gotten quite some response on my Netgear SC101 post (in short: they don’t always work). There’s some catharsis in bashing inferior products, but at the end of the day, how DOES on store lots of data securely? Let’s make this more specific: how would you store 1 terabyte (1000 GB) of data on your desktop?
Let take these as requirements:

  • raw storage: 1TB or more (if used with RAID-0 striping or JBOD config)
  • redundant storage: RAID-1: leaves 500GB, RAID-5: leaves 660GB to 800GB
  • affordable: anything higher that €2000 (2$/GB) is not an option
  • accessible via either Firewire/USB or Ethernet (Gigabit)
  • accessible by Mac, PC and Linux
  • preferably not rack-mounted (who has a 19″ rack at home)
  • hot-swappable disks are a big advantage

What have you tried and what are you happy with?

Some possible theoretical options:

Direct attached drive
e.g. Lacie Biggest F800 1GB, 4-disk S-ATA: €1299
meets requirements? YES. Only Firewire + USB
Network attached storage
e.g. Maxtor Shared Storage II 1GB, 2-disk: €899
meets requirements? YES. Only Ethernet
Lacie Ethernet disk would not work: it’s rackmounted and has no RAID
Build your own server
e.g. Dell PowerEdge SC430 with 2 x SATA 500GB drives and Linux: around €1000
meets requirements? YES. Only Ethernet

For me, the only solution I have experienced to be 100% reliable is building a dedicated PC with a hardware RAID card. What is your experience?

Netgear SC101: crappy storage

Published on July 10, 2006 in hardware. 181 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , .

UPDATE: also read my post about testing the Netgear ReadyNAS (it doesn’t suck)
Storage porn

In my continuing quest for more and better storage, I have taken the following path:

  • Maxtor 5000DV, 120GB USB/Firewire, bought in 2003. Was dependable for 3 years (warranty period: 2 years) but has crashed a couple of times since (with data loss)
  • LaCie Porsche, 160GB USB, bought in 2004. Worked OK for 2 years (warranty period: 2 years) but has crashed a couple of times since (with data loss)
  • Iomega Desktop hard drive, 250GB 100Mb Ethernet, bought in 2005. Hasn’t broken down yet, but makes way too much noise (loud ventilator, running continuously).
  • Netgear SC-101, 2x300GB Ethernet, bought in 2006. Supports RAID-1 mirroring, which I needed after all my hard disk crashes. For my less-than-optimal experience, read on.

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Database war stories: DB vs ‘square’ files

Published on May 5, 2006 in bandwidth, Belgium, hardware and mypast. 2 Comments Tags: , , , .

Plug and PlayI’ve been following the Database War Stories of O’Reilly Radar: how companies use text-based alternatives to classic relational database systems in order to cope with huge volumes. Check out the stories of Findory/Amazon, Google File System, Flickr and Second Life. Anyway, this seemed like a good moment to share some of my database war stories. Let me take you back to the early nineties.

1993 @ Ukkel
I arrive at Sopres, one of the larger direct marketing / database management companies in Belgium. Fresh from university (and 1 year of military service), I expect to see RDBMS everywhere and dive into SQL. Imagine my surprise when I see that, yes, there are a lot of Sybase SQLServer databases around, but the bulk of the work is done with something they call ‘square files’ (see below). They have built a whole set of tools to work with those and by using them myself, I learn to appreciate the advantanges of the system (speed, mainly) and grow a fairly accurate intuition for things like queries, indexes and outer joins.
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Double Wifi: municipal wifi with protection

Published on April 13, 2006 in bandwidth, hardware and wifi. 1 Comment

I have written about FON before (they provide a business model for sharing one’s bandwidth through Wifi). They use a custom firmware for the Linksys WRT54G routers. I have the feeling that current Wifi routers (or access points) cannot offer a good balance of security/flexibility. Opening your own network for everyone is currently too dangerous. There’s Wifi trolls that gobble up your bandwidth and there’s hackers that scan your ports for vulnerabilities. My idea is that now you would need 2 Wifi zones, one behind the other, each having different security and different policies. With access points costing as little as 25 euro, that is not a big investment.

I see 2 scenario’s:
Scenario 1: first the public
Double Wifi: first the public

Description
The first router is connected to your broadband and serves the PUBLIC zone (e.g. SSID “FREEWIFI”). On one of the wired Ethernet connections (the Linksys has 4 of those) the other router is connected, that serves the PRIVATE zone (e.g. SSID “PROTECTED”). Both are in a different IP range. The PUBLIC one requires no login, the PRIVATE one requires WPA + maybe MAC address checking.
PRO
* both the Internet and the PUBLIC zone are outside your PRIVATE network, so you can have the same firewall settings for both, and ‘dangerous’ traffic never passes over your INTERNAL network.
* the first router can be configured to prioritize traffic from the fixed ports i.e. the PRIVATE network.
CONTRA
* If the PUBLIC router does not support QoS (Quality of Service) or bandwidth shaping, then a wifi troll can consume all the available bandwidth, and the PRIVATE network is left without anything.
* if the PUBLIC router is broken (or switched off) no one has Internet connection.

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