ZFS will come of age in 2009.
In 2008, I had to explain what ZFS was and why it’s different to the existing volume/filesystem model. By the end of 2009, IT Pros will all be aware of it, what it does and will likely have at least a little of it in their production infrastructure. Sun has already started that ball rolling.
Heck, with full-blown support of ZFS likely to be in OSX 10.6, “Snow Leopard”, it’ll even make in-roads to the home-market. Or course, if Apple announce a ZFS-based upgraded Time Capsule/Home Server at MacWorld ExPo tomorrow that’ll happen sooner.
From a capacity perspective, with 2TB or greater drives being the de-facto standard capacity by the end of 2009 (compared with 1TB today), the growth of all types of media; including photographs, personal video and the increasing availability of internet-distributed hi-def content, coupled with the pack-rat nature of most of us (me included), demand for storage capacity has never been higher. It’ll also push the more mainstream storage user towards the 10-12TB Unrecoverable Read Error issue , aka known as the death of RAID5.
To deal with increasing capacity and the straight line graph of bit-error rates, drive manufacturers keep making their drives smarter to handle errors and attempt to minimize data loss. This is the wrong approach, but it’s unavoidable as otherwise they commoditize themselves further. Drives should be stupid and let something further up the stack manage this. That something is ZFS.
Of course, this mostly applies to cheaper SATA drives. The more expensive UltraSCSI and SAS commanded a premium for performance and reliability. Move reliability into the filesystem and you’re just paying a premium for performance. Obviously, some need the performance which is why these drives and ancillary equipment and technologies like Fibre Channel will stay around, but I think it’s worth considering if you really need that CLARiiON or Symmetrix…
I’ve had a few LaCie drives in my time, and all but two have given up the ghost. The remaining two were on light-duties, but both recently refused to spin-up after a reboot.
I found that it’s not a rare problem, and after reading this article, I stuck my multimeter on the power cable and found they were both barely putting out 11V, 1V less than the specified 12V. The 5V line looked a little low too.
So anyway, I logged a support ticket with LaCie, who said as my drives are out of warranty I’d have to buy a new PSU for $20. I followed-up by reminding them that it’s a well-documented problem on the interwebs. They promptly responded with a offer of 2 free PSUs!
Bravo LaCie, but you should have offered them up straight away if you know there’s a problem with this batch of PSUs. Still, I’m happy you handled this case as well as you did – many thanks.
Still, I’ve moved on. I’m not a fan of the RAID0 stripes LaCie use in their products, I’ve lost data because of it (and spent $2k to get it back). My Drobo isn’t behaving well either. The Netgear/Infrant ReadyNAS NV is still going strong though – if I wasn’t building my own NAS I’d buy the ReadyNAS Pro.
I can’t wait until my 12TB ZFS, RAIDZ2 server is up and running…
As I’ve lost a drive in one of my NAS arrays, I need to replace it. The ReadyNAS can handle different types of drive, but will only perform at the capacity and speed of the smallest and slowest drive in the set. As I have 3 good HDS 400 GB drives and 400 GB is a little on the small side, I thought I’d do a rolling upgrade by putting in a bigger drive. So what’s the largest capacity SATA drive available today? It’s the Seagate Barracuda 750 GB one. So, after checking the HCL at Infrant to ensure it’d work with the ReadyNAS, I noticed that there are a couple of models to choose from – even after ruling out the 8 MB cache in favor of the 16 MB version.
Checking out my favorite store for harddrives, ZipZoomFly, I noticed that there’s a difference in price between the 2 models I’m interested in, the ST3750640AS and the ST3750640NS. Now as the Seagate site is down at the moment (I hope that’s not prophecy), I had a quick look at the Hard OCP Forum before heading to the Infrant Forums where I found a good thread explaining the differences.
Basically the NS version handles the additional heat and vibration better than the AS version, and it’s the one Seagate recommends for running in NAS/RAID configurations. So I got one for $320 and it should arrive in a couple of days.
“Disk fail event occurred on SATA channel 2. Please replace the failed disk as soon as possible.”
We like the ReadyNAS too! It was a HDS HDS724040KLSA80 7K400 GB Deskstar that failed.
