Notes from the Disk Trenches

I have been busy with some storage consolidation and testing of my own in the past couple of weeks — in my home network, which now has several Terabytes of capacity.

Just before Christmas, I deployed a 1 TB Hammer Z array from Bell Micro.  Some preliminary thoughts:

First, the unit is a solid performer.  It is essentially a case of drives a bit smaller than a half-height PC tower case that deliver more than adequate speeds and feeds to serve as a file server for A/V files.  Overall: a good implementation of Zetera Storage over IP technology (UDP and IP). 

We configured all of the SATA disks in the unit as a single virtual drive, which saved me IP addresses which would otherwise need to be allocated to each share of each drive.  Were I in a business setting, I probably would have built a mirrored RAID configuration to better protect my data, but I use tape for backing up the data on the array, so I went for capacity instead of on-board protection.  Plus, at home, I am using consumer grade GigE switches with a limited amount of IP address space; in my office, I have more expensive and capable switches.

The only bummer about this unit:  Bell chose to use “signed drives” in its implementation.  This might be good for Bell, but it pissed me off a little because it goes against the philosophy of open storage that I believe is at the heart of the Zetera technology value prop.  The proprietary drive signing not only requires that I purchase drives from Bell (probably at a mark-up), it also means that the driver for the Bell unit doesn’t like to coexist with other Netgear Z-SAN boxes that have been in my network for over a year now. 

You can’t load both the Zetera driver for its Netgear Storage Central boxes and also the one for the Bell Micro Hammer Z on the same PC.  There are several workarounds for this issue.  The one I settled on was to make the Hammer Z box a local drive of one of the PCs of the network, which subsequently shared it out as a Microsoft network drive share.  This kind of defeats the purpose of Zetera technology by requiring a PC to “broker” reads and writes to the Hammer. 

I hope that Bell will look at working out a common driver that will enable all Zetera gear to share the same driver.  (Look, Tom, you guys are selling most of the world’s disk drives anyway.  The chances are good that everyone will be buying drives indirectly through Bell anyway to populate your chassis.  Let’s not be greedy.)

I have also deployed the new Storage Central Turbo from NetGear to absorb the first generation “little toasters” I originally deployed.  Then as now, I think I am among the first folks to have one (thanks, Chuck!). 

The SC 101T or “Turbo” unit features support for SATA, GigE, and includes heat dissipating fans that the little toasters lacked (though I never had problems with the PATA and heat sink design of the original SC101).  The capacity of the unit I received was 360 GB.  I will be upgrading the drives shortly to Seagate 750 GB Perpendicular Recording drives for a whopping 1.5 TB of capacity in the unit, which is still one of the least expensive storage solutions in town.  (As with the 101, the Turbo chassis is dirt cheap and you add your favorite SATA drives.)

In the case of the Storage Central Turbo, the driver software is backward compatible with the original Storage Centrals (the “little toasters”), so there is no problema.

I also received and deployed a NAS box from Western Digital a while back, boasting about a half TB of capacity.  This box is bullet proof and actually rather pretty.  I have it in my bedroom with my media center and widescreen TV because it makes less noise than the Hammer.  I wholly recommend it to anyone who just needs a quick half-TB of space.

I originally got the Western Digital NetCenter to provide space for use by my son, who was put into an Apple platform by Jeremy and his gang; the Zetera technology stuff was not Mac compatible (until the release of their Mac driver last week).  Interesting note:  The NetCenter has outlived my son’s Apple, which is now heading into the shop for a motherboard replacement — less than a year after purchase.  I worry that frequent replacement and repair are signatures of Apple products; Max has not only had to replace his desktop, but also his iPod — something like four times in two years.

Also in my home network is an older pre-Adaptec SNAP Server 2200.  It houses two PATA drives, I’m not sure of the capacity, but the unit just keeps humming along.  Maybe I will take it off the line sometime this year; it’s about due.  But it is as solid as a rock right now and it makes a good backup target for my primary desktop drives.

The home network represents the most lucrative opportunity for disk system vendors going forward.  They stand to make a lot more money selling smaller products to a lot of customers than a few big iron arrays to the Fortune 500.  My two centavos.