The 10TB iSCSI SAN

From the, “I’m not entirely sure how I got here” section of the Internet comes this SAN on eBay. At $2,000 it’s a little out of my price range, but it’s pretty much what I’ve wanted for a long time: a box that will just sit in the corner, but that also kicks butt. Seven hot-swappable 1500GB SATA disks with 32MB cache each, behind a RAID controller that supports auto-rebuild and RAID 6. Speaks NFS, SMB, CIFS, AFP, and also FTP and HTTP(S). And apparently, an HTTP/FTP/BitTorrent download manager via its web interface.

And it seems to get good reviews, too. I initially thought it was just a cheap enclosure with 7x big drives, but it’s actually a full-blown computer, and it has some serious features, like the apparent ability to bond across its dual GigE ports, and to work over iSCSI. I’ve seen mention of it having ZFS support if you’re not happy enough with ext3. (ZFS supports a lot of cool features, though I’m not sure I’m familiar enough with it to use it on something important.)

$2,000’s some serious money, but it buys you a 10 terabyte SAN that speaks iSCSI, has bonded GigE, and has a “real” RAID card (one that does more than RAID 1/0). (Oh, shop around! It looks like it’s under $1,000 without disks. Which actually makes it seem kind of expensive.)

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