[CentOS] [OT] 8-15 TB storage: any recommendations?

[Ray Van Dolson]

On Thu, Jan 07, 2010 at 05:28:34PM +0000, Joseph L. Casale wrote:
> >> I also heard that disks above 1TB might have reliability issues.
> >> Maybe it changed since then...
> >>
> >
> >I remember rumors about the early 2TB Seagates.
> >
> >Personally, I won't RAID SATA drives over 500GB unless they're
> >enterprise-level ones with the limits on how long before the drive
> >reports a problem back to the host when it has a read error.
> >
> >Which should also take care of the reliability issue to a large
> >degree.
> 
> An often overlooked issue is the rebuild time with Linux software
> raid and all hw raid controllers I have seen. On large drives the
> times are so long as a result of the sheer size, if the array is
> degraded you are exposed during the rebuild. ZFS's resilver has this
> addressed as good as you can by only copying actual data.
> 
> With this in mind, it's wise to consider how you develop the
> redundancy into the solution...

Very true... especially with 1TB+ drives you definitely are crazy to
run anything other than RAID-6.

Lately we've been buying 24 bay systems from Silicon Mechanics,
installing Solaris 10 and running RAID-Z2 + SSD for L2ARC and ZIL.
Makes for great NFS storage...

The next release of Solaris 10 should have RAID-Z3 which might be
better for the >1TB drives out there.

(You can of course do this with OpenSolaris as well and something
similar on CentOS albeit not with ZFS).

When we need a little higher level of HA and "Enterprise-ness" we go
NetApp.  Just. Works. :)

Ray