Friday
14Jul2006
The Databox
Friday, July 14, 2006 at 12:06PM
Yeah, I want a [Databox](http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/07/12/Home-Storage). Actually, like [Simon](http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/webmink?entry=love_at_tera_byte), really I want a [Thumper](http://www.sun.com/servers/x64/x4500/), but after my experiences with the T2000, I think I'd be made to switch it off at night lest the neighbours complain about the noise. Again.
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Reader Comments (4)
Yes, those things are best kept in a server room or closet. For home use I have a Buffalo Terastation which gives me 4x250Gb as a raid 5 array all in a 2 ft cube. The lust for the thumper box is a bit impractical for home :-)
The Terastation is, by most metrics and reviews, crap. What you and Bray want is an Infrant ReadyNAS NV (see http://www.infrant.com). It doesn't run Solaris, but it does run on a SPARC, and it's small and quiet enough to forget it's there.
What I thought was surprising about the Databox post was the low storage volume Bray suggests. A half-terabyte over ten cheap disks? I spent less than a grand on four SATA disks and the ReadyNAS itself and I already have just under a terabyte in RAID5.
It's so simple to put together an x86 based server with massive potential for growth, and initial cost will be quite competitive with a ReadyNAS, I'd say. Also, you get a full-fledged server, not just a NAS solution.
Just buy a really big PC server case, something like this perhaps: http://www.tricod.de/index.php?id=74# - it can be had for a few hundred euroes including dual 400 watt power supplies. Then mount a PC motherboard with CPU, memory, integrated graphics and integrated gigabit ports in it, buy add-on cards for more SATA connectors, a few hot-swap enclosures that fit in the 11 exposed 5.25 inch drive slots and then start out with five drives (2 x ufs for the boot mirror, 3 x ZFS for a RAID-Z.
Presto, a terabyte of storage with an easy upgrade path to several times that in one machine, and it's a full fledged Solaris 10 x86 server that you can use for all kinds of fun stuff.
Sure, it's more fiddly than a plug-in-and-forget ReadyNAS but it's also more capable.
I got a Terastation pretty cheap and so far it is way more reliable than any NAS i have tried before (anyone got a spare network card for a SnapServer?). But I'll take a look at the one you suggest, thanks.