RHEL to FreeBSD file server

[Steven Schlansker]

On Nov 16, 2012, at 11:24 AM, Zaphod Beeblebrox <zbeeble at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Nov 16, 2012 at 3:17 AM, Rainer Duffner <rainer at ultra-secure.de> wrote:
>> Am Fri, 16 Nov 2012 01:03:19 -0500
>> schrieb Zaphod Beeblebrox <zbeeble at gmail.com>:
> 
>>> The only price I see is $2449 on Dell's website.  Ouch.  For 8G.
> 
>> I saw it for 1800€ somewhere.
>> FusionIO is 10k for 320G.
>> 
>> But I've never seen FusionIO used in a Fileserver - probably doesn't
>> make sense, price-wise.
>> 
>> IIRC, the OP wanted to build a 16T fileserver. So he will have to spend
>> some cash anyway.  I think it's a safe assumption that Nexenta and its
>> partners have spent quite some time evaluating the various options.
> <snip>
> go on
> to connect 24 (or 30) drives.  If you're using "green" 2T's, the speed
> of 4 disks on one channel is about half of the speed of
> 1-disk-per-channel.
> <snip>
> 
> The reason I say all this... is that this config runs about $3500-ish
> here in Canada (where green 2T's are ~$109).  The ZeusRAM drive up
> there is 2/3 of that.

Curious -- have you been running this setup for any length of time?  There's
a fair number of horror stories about the "green" drives in particular.

The power management is very aggressive about spin down, causing many unneeded
power on/off cycles, dramatically reducing lifespan in a RAID configuration.

Additionally, supposedly the error recovery is inappropriate leading to drive
failure events.  (I believe the feature is known as TLER, time-limited error recovery)

Have you run into this?