Hi,

I have been looking into new technologies and strategies for my storage needs as of late. I will be moving everything over to this new small architecture sometime before the end of the year or into next year.

More specifically I have been looking into the following technologies:

1) Online Backup

First off I want to do daily backups of my workspace directory which houses all of my current and on-going web development work. Losing my workspace directory is not an option and I am not entirely happy with my USB drive backup.

I have been looking into a few online backup services and I really like the service offered by JUNGLE DISK (http://www.jungledisk.com/). There are a few other services out there but Jungle disk seems to have the biggest bang for the buck.

My workspace directory is edging up to 3 GIG which would translate into a monthly bill less than .50 cents. A daily sync of all the deltas from my workspace would be all that’s needed.

I have some other directories that I would place on Jungle Disk but they don't get changed very often.


2) NAS

I am still not sure which product to select here. The Apple Time Capsule (http://www.apple.com/timecapsule/)looks exactly like what I want but I am hesitant since I still do all of my development from an XP op sys. Has any XP users out there used the Time Capsule?

My other alternative would be a Buffalo product like the Link Station EZ (http://www.buffalotech.com/products/network-storage/linkstation/linkstation-ez-ls-cl/).

I just want to dump my photos, music and large install executables on the NAS and leave it there. I would probably do a bi-annual USB drive backup of the NAS and throw the USB drive into our fire-box for safe keeping for the rest of the year.


3) Solid State HD (SSD)

This is one of the few storage technologies that I am really excited about. Prices for SSDs are dropping like stones and the sizes are up to around 128GB which is way more than I need for my workstation especially if I off-load my music and photos to a NAS.

So far I am basing my searches off a tigerdirect product page:

http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/category/category_slc.asp?CatId=2503 (http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/category/category_slc.asp?CatId=2503)

Even at $500 for a SATA II I think it’s a great deal for the read/write times that are available.

During development I have a lot of memory hogs up and running like Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Visual Studio, etc. I think solid state is going to take me into a whole new world of responsiveness, not to mention zoning times are going to drop ;).

Is anyone using solid stat yet? Which products are you using? Any major pitfalls? Any performance or failure issues?


Insight into any or all of the above areas would be greatly appreciated. I think with this multi level approach I am going to make my storage work for me instead of the other way around.


Thanks in advance.


Cheers,

I use MozyPro for several servers at work, and the "home" version of it for my machine at home. Have absolutely loved it.

Solid State HD's, supposedly, are drawing 100% power at all times (as long as the computer is on, at least) - which can cause them to burn out faster than a regular HD. Not that they've been around long enough to test it, but that's the theory. Let me know how that works for you!

That's a myth. They have an estimated MTBF of ~50 years.

Estimated MTBF doesn't really mean anything, but aside from very poor manufacturing there is essentially no way a solid-state device is going to be less reliable than one with multiple precision moving parts. In their intended operating environment (ie, not on shitty circuits or banged around like thumb drives) those things should last a long, long time.

They also only draw power on fetch or store operations aside from whatever the reactive load of the controller, otherwise you'd lose everything on them when you turned it off.

I'm fairly unimpressed with the Apple device and only barely more excited about the Buffalo product you put up there. The Apple states it is 1 large drive, which to me loses about 70% of the reason to use NAS. No RAID, no deal. I'm not 100% sure, but it seems like you just have 1 machine, so I'm not sure why you wouldn't just buy a large drive and stick it in the machine. Other than the "ooouuu-aaahhh" factor of the wireless hard drive, I see zero benefit in the Apple machine over the Buffalo and the Buffalo at least seems to imply it is RAID capable ( though that page was pretty lacking in actual info, or maybe I'm just lazy ). They both have auto-backup abilities, but the Apple appears tied into MACOS.

What also scares me is neither mentions what protocols they support ( though here with the Apple, I assume it has some proprietary linkage to the MACOS Time thingy it talks about ), which leads me to think they built some "ease of use" software on top of known protocols like CIFS or SMB, which 99% of the time I find ease of use software to be anything but easy or usable.

From the sounds of what you are trying to do, I would suggest online backup as the way to go.

I love my linkstation pro from buffalo. I have had it for 3 years with no problems. I only have a 500gb version but the 1TB version is two 500gb drives that can be in RAID also there are much bigger versions now. Also the Buffalo allows you to attach USB hard drives to add extra space.

Estimated MTBF doesn't really mean anything, but aside from very poor manufacturing there is essentially no way a solid-state device is going to be less reliable than one with multiple precision moving parts. In their intended operating environment (ie, not on shitty circuits or banged around like thumb drives) those things should last a long, long time.

They also only draw power on fetch or store operations aside from whatever the reactive load of the controller, otherwise you'd lose everything on them when you turned it off.

Good to know, I'm a lot less scared now. We just got a few solid state HDs for our new RED, and I was afraid I'd need to shell the cash out to replace them every other year or something absurd.

We just got a few solid state HDs for our new RED

What kind of a performance increase did you see when you installed the solid state HDs Kel? Was it a dramatic difference?


Cheers,

I have no idea, its a digital film camera, not a computer. We couldn't use traditional hard drives because mounting them on a car or roller coaster or something would shake them to shit.

What kind of a performance increase did you see when you installed the solid state HDs Kel? Was it a dramatic difference?


Cheers,

They're faster, but not that much faster in the real world, from what I've used. Memory/FSB is bottlenecks you a lot more often than random access from disk.

I have a similar NAS from buffalo. The front end was a bit wonky to load but once I got it working it was fairly good. Mine was only a single disk system though, if you're super worried about it I'd make sure whatever system I used, that it has a mirrored RAID array.

The performance advantages of solid state only become apparent in highly random access, for sequential transfers modern disks are already so dense that if they don't have to seek, they're almost as fast. For any PC use you're limited by stupid software more than hardware at this point.

I've been pretty happy with http://www.freenas.org/

Speaking of SSDs, I just ordered a laptop with a Samsung 128gb SSD. Will be interesting to see how it performs.

Keep us updated Sanchek. I am extremly interested in these drives. May I ask the price of the SSD?

Cheers,

I mostly lost track of the price through the incremental upgrades, but I think it was in the ballpark of $600-700.

These newer SSDs are getting pretty spiffy. This video is what sold me on it instead of a 7200rpm HDD.

Dt6VbOY3xE0

Well, my 10k RPM SATA drive in the desktop scores a 5.7 in the Vista Windows Experience benchmark. The SSD in the laptop scores a 5.9.

Not a huge difference in absolute terms, but relative to drives in that 2.5" form factor it's pretty good. No drive noise is nice too.

I'd definitely go with SSD over any rotating disc in a laptop for a variety of reasons. Also, that Vista "Benchmark" could basically be making numbers up for all the good it does, linear read/write speed hasn't been a concern on consumer systems in years.

Here's HD Tune's benchmark on the 10k RPM HDD.

And, for the SSD.

So, now I'm wondering why I don't have one of these in my desktop...

So I ticked off 2 of the 3 items on my original list:

Online Backup:
I went with JungleDisk, its a small software package that lets you gain access in to Amazon's gargantuan storage cloud.

The cost is minuscule compared to other services and I can use as much or as little space as I want.

I uploaded about 4 GB of data to the service initially at a cost of 10 cents per GB. Then they charge a monthly fee for the space you use + about 12 centers per GB data transfer. My monthly bill is something like 80 cents.

The JungleDisk software can be setup to do backups on a schedule and it only takes the deltas. Amazon even does versioning of your files on the fly in their system.

I have been extremely happy with the service.


NAS:

I bought the Dlink DNS 323 (http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=509) and slapped in 2 1TB drives and mirrored them.

So far so good with this product and it came in just under $500.


SSD

I will have to wait until late this year or early 2010 to buy into an SSD, my workstation will need upgrading by then. Hopefully by that time the manufacturers that are bringing these to market will have them in their 3rd or 4th generation.


Cheers,

SSD

I will have to wait until late this year or early 2010 to buy into an SSD, my workstation will need upgrading by then. Hopefully by that time the manufacturers that are bringing these to market will have them in their 3rd or 4th generation.

This is pretty exciting, along those lines: http://www.i4u.com/article22595.html

New SanDisk SSD G3 is as fast as a 40,000rpm HDD

/uncontrolled drooling

The price points are insane low considering how early these types or drives are in their product lifecycle. I will keep my eyes locked on the manufacturers for the remainder of the year, can't wait to see what G4 has in store for us.

Thanks for the infos Sanchek.


Cheers,

I'm assuming that's an opportunistic ratio, based on whatever the drive does best in comparison to HDDs.

Still, it seems like it has great potential. After using the laptop with SSD, I definitely want one for my desktop instead of the 10k Raptor. Benchmarks aside, it definitely "feels" much faster during I/O.

I'm fairly unimpressed with the Apple device and only barely more excited about the Buffalo product you put up there. The Apple states it is 1 large drive, which to me loses about 70% of the reason to use NAS. No RAID, no deal. I'm not 100% sure, but it seems like you just have 1 machine, so I'm not sure why you wouldn't just buy a large drive and stick it in the machine. Other than the "ooouuu-aaahhh" factor of the wireless hard drive, I see zero benefit in the Apple machine over the Buffalo and the Buffalo at least seems to imply it is RAID capable ( though that page was pretty lacking in actual info, or maybe I'm just lazy ). They both have auto-backup abilities, but the Apple appears tied into MACOS.

What also scares me is neither mentions what protocols they support ( though here with the Apple, I assume it has some proprietary linkage to the MACOS Time thingy it talks about ), which leads me to think they built some "ease of use" software on top of known protocols like CIFS or SMB, which 99% of the time I find ease of use software to be anything but easy or usable.

From the sounds of what you are trying to do, I would suggest online backup as the way to go.

Filatal, I don't know if you know this, but you can actually hook up multiple hard disks to the Time Machine/AirPort Extreme via USB through a USB hub. I have all of my hard disks connected to it. You can also share them via SMB/CIFS.

Also, it works with printer sharing. If your printer doesn't have a network port, you can actually share the printer as a network printer via SMB/AFP/CUPS (Common Unix Printing System).

Back to the SSD derail. This is plain awesome:

96dWOEa4Djs

SSDs as boot drives are getting very affordable, if you haven't been watching. The 80gb Intel X25-M is under $250 on Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002IJA1EG?ie=UTF8&tag=encosia-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B002IJA1EG).

Especially nice when combined with Win7's optimizations for SSDs (http://www.tomshardware.com/news/windows-solid-state-drives-ssd,7717.html) (though, most of that is more "unoptmization", to get the OS out of the drive's way, really).

Still of concern on these is being aware of your usage patterns. For laptops that aren't ding serious IO anyway it's clearly a big win in every way, but if you do lots of writes to the same data blocks you can wear these things out much, much faster than you'd expect. Also, you don't want to defragment SSD drives, etc.

I've been thinking about replacing the HD in my mac mini with one, but for serious data storage they really need to address how to handle wear-leveling at the OS level and the overall long-term reliability of the hardware.

They've already addressed all of that in Win7 (automatically avoids defragging and other operations that would cause undue wear on SSDs) and the latest Intel firmwares (wear leveling, TRIM, etc).

The firmwares on most newer drives also prevents you from committing that last write that would render a block inoperable. So, even when the drive eventually "fails", you can still read the data off it. The majority of SSD failures should result in no data loss, which is awesome in comparison with our current situation.

Yeah, it's all getting there, but large-scale implementation of the TRIM operation and such are still "in the works." The current lineup is great for most desktops, but with more and more people doing stuff like running local databases or video streaming, it's still something to think about.

One nice thing is that more and more systems are incorporating these as cache drives, so like for ZFS you can define a SSD as your cache and get all the advantages of it while still maintaining a much larger and more trusted rotating-disc RAID array.