For a few disconnected systems (not on regular network) I decided to buy a
few Thecus 5200 NAS / FTP boxes, using SATA drives and RAID 6 with five
drives.   The performance is very decent for a consumer product, and I was
measuring about 50 MB/second using gigabit ethernet when writing backup
files.

I am having very serious problems however maintaining the integrity of the
RAID.    Mysteriously a drive has just dropped out of the RAID
configuration, even though no errors are reported on the drive or any other
part of the RAID.   Worse, the system reports that the remaining four drives
are now in a dangerous JBOD configuration.   So much for RAID 6.    The
technical support has been a real joke, and they are very slow to solve any
problem.   They obviously have a very buggy product, so having someone who
can fix what is broken becomes very important for that case, and they fail
the grade there.    So they are out.

I'm looking for a replacement.     What I need is a SATA RAID 6 box with
four to six hot swap drives, mini tower or rackmount configuration, and
gigabit ethernet.    It needs to support at minimum NAS and FTP.
Performance for writes over NAS need to be at least 30MB second using four
spindles in a RAID 6 array.   And support should be at least decent.
Product gets brownie points if I can connect to it directly using eSATA
instead of hassling with NAS (security issues).    Price needs to be around
$600 without the drives (but trays included).    For my application a
consumer focused product is okay since my use is single threaded backups to
disk, but the RAID system needs to be quite robust.

Any and all recommendations are appreciated.

--
Will

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"Will" <westes-usc@noemail.nospam> wrote in message
 news:nJedncNJ7dpCZwLbnZ2dnUVZ_umlnZ2d@gi
ganews.com...
> For a few disconnected systems (not on regular network) I decided to buy a
> few Thecus 5200 NAS / FTP boxes, using SATA drives and RAID 6 with five
> drives.   The performance is very decent for a consumer product, and I was
> measuring about 50 MB/second using gigabit ethernet when writing backup
> files.
>
You may want to run DataMover on this target, it performs target level data
integrity testing in addtion to performance testing.  It will help pinpoint
the problem.

Da Moojit

> I am having very serious problems however maintaining the integrity of the
> RAID.    Mysteriously a drive has just dropped out of the RAID
> configuration, even though no errors are reported on the drive or any
> other part of the RAID.   Worse, the system reports that the remaining
> four drives are now in a dangerous JBOD configuration.   So much for RAID
> 6.    The technical support has been a real joke, and they are very slow
> to solve any problem.   They obviously have a very buggy product, so
> having someone who can fix what is broken becomes very important for that
> case, and they fail the grade there.    So they are out.
>
> I'm looking for a replacement.     What I need is a SATA RAID 6 box with
> four to six hot swap drives, mini tower or rackmount configuration, and
> gigabit ethernet.    It needs to support at minimum NAS and FTP.
> Performance for writes over NAS need to be at least 30MB second using four
> spindles in a RAID 6 array.   And support should be at least decent.
> Product gets brownie points if I can connect to it directly using eSATA
> instead of hassling with NAS (security issues).    Price needs to be
> around $600 without the drives (but trays included).    For my application
> a consumer focused product is okay since my use is single threaded backups
> to disk, but the RAID system needs to be quite robust.
>
> Any and all recommendations are appreciated.
>
> --
> Will
>

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