External RAID Enclosures over USB3 - What we know now

Having now tried a couple different Buffalo, Mediasonic, and finally Vantec enclosures, I can rather confidently point folks to the Vantec NST-640S3R enclosure:

Compared to both the Buffalo enclosures and the Mediasonic enclosures the Vantec has the far better cooling setup. This is partly because they space all four drives - which can be individually removed without having to take the whole front cover off first - and partly because the fan is on top and so draws the rising hot air right out. As opposed to back mounted fans on the other products.

That the Vantec also looks nicer (opinion, obviously) is a plus for folks who aren't hiding the unit behind their PC or monitor.

Most importantly to most of us, the system also is the fastest I have tested. The Buffalo USB3 enclosures would average 50-60 with peaks to 70. The Mediasonic enclosures would average 30-40 with peaks to 60. The Vantec averages 90-100 with peaks to 130. Impressive to say the least. Given that these were the exact 4 same hard drives I feel comfortable ruling out any SATA or Western Digital issues being behind the speed differences. Of course these are also using my standard setup of RAID-0 striping since I have two units and so do not need the slight additional protection that RAID-5 might bring.

What surprised me most was that the Vantec - at least at the time I bought it - was the cheapest of the units. I suspect that is timing as much as anything, but even the listed prices are comparable to the Mediasonic. And both of them are cheaper than Buffalo. If I had to do it all over I would have just bought the Vantec and the drives back in February. But then I wouldn't have the real world testing experience to back up my opinion.

Hopefully this helps out any of you who are looking to get massive, quick storage for under $1K.

The PS4 that Might Have Been

I was thinking about why Sony might not have wanted to show what the new PS4 looks like when I rummaged over the specs again. It occurred to me as I was reading them that if you took two of their high-end Android tablets and put them together in a box, you'd have almost an equivalent system. It then occurred to me that maybe Sony has done something brilliant. So imagine that the PS4 is actually a base station for up to four PS4 "slices". Each slice can be docked to allow it to play games that are run by a controller, and are hooked up to your TV. But the slices can also be undocked to let you play the games that only need a single slice to power the game. So you would literally be playing the same game that could sync your progress back to the base station. You could also have games that require 3 or 4 slices, or let additional slices also be used as controllers. As if that all wasn't wild enough, you would then be able to upgrade the slices yearly (just like tablets get updated every year now) to allow you to get a PS5 for just the price of the new slice. Sony could almost give away the base station to hook you into the yearly upgrades. Even if this isn't what Sony is doing, I wonder if someone couldn't put together an Android base station that you could dock android tablets matching certain specs to do such a thing. If so, let me know when you setup your Kickstarter :-)

Watch this space?

Am using this post to try out a few ideas for doing something I've had in mind for sometime. I will try to remember to NOT share each time I post it. If I screw up, well hopefully y'all will understand.

Test 1:


End Test

Let's see how that did...

Ubuntu 12.10 - One Step Forward, Two Back

About this time last year I wrote a post about how in many ways the latest Ubuntu was a better windows than windows itself. So when it came time to go back to Linux to address my RAID needs, I have to say I was expecting a journey of minimal hassles - outside of the networking issue that finally forced me to adopt Windows again last year.

You can imagine my disappointment when installing the 12.10 release was harder than setting up the RAID device turned out to be. It seems that since 12.04 was a long term release that it's main goal was to be rock solid. This meant that 12.10 was the first release for last year where they could try to build in several new items. And it appears that for a lot of folks (myself included) the new stuff is great fun - once you can actually get it working.

At the moment this means that while I got the RAID setup and the copy completed I am still working to get Ubuntu to use my nVidia card correctly. The current fix I'm in the middle of trying is to bring in a package of Unix Kernel headers to allow the system to rebuild the nVidia interface as needed when I upgrade to the proprietary driver. If that sounds rather complex, well it certainly is more so than I would expect for someone casually using Linux. Now, I used to compile my own kernels so in my case it's just an extra bit of hassle. But it seems like something I really wouldn't expect to run into on a system that is supposed to be "Linux for the rest of us".

I've noticed that some early reports of the upcoming 13.04 release indicate it might be more stable. However I am not inclined to jump into that right away until I see some of the same folks reporting the same problems I am having saying they have found it to be easier to work with.

Given how much I need the RAID storage, it is unlikely I will decide to jump back to Windows on this machine. Whether I try to get most of the rest of the household on Ubuntu is a different story. How much grief I go through will likely play a part on this.

To RAID or not to RAID - Is that the Question?

In my previous posting I talked a bit about the solution I was working with in Windows to do Drive Pooling. Concept is that you get the benefit of treating several disks as one disk, and letting the software balance out what goes where to minimize wasted space. The best package that does that out there is called "Drive Bender", and is based on work they did with Windows Home Server that had a previous plug-in to add some functionality to the pools available in that product.

The problem is that speed of writes take a HUGE nosedive. Compared to earlier this year when I copied from one Buffalo 6TB RAID-0 enclosure to another with write speeds between 60-90 mb/s, Drive Bender was giving speeds closer to 2 mb/s with occasional bursts up to 30 mb/s. So a copy that took around 6-7 hours was now taking days. The idea of letting a copy go on for several days was mildly frustrating, but knowing how often I have to reboot a Windows machine I was fairly sure I would never complete a full single copy, and breaking it down into multiple chunks and making sure I didn't miss anything was not looking all that good either.

So I broke down and did what was appearing to be inevitable. I installed Ubuntu 12.10 64-bit on my machine. I just allowed it to do the necessary updates, and then got right into setting up my array.

One of the first things there was to notice that Linux also plays a little strange with hard drives of more than 2TB, and so also insists on using GPT for the partition type if you are going to have only a single partition on the disk. I gather that the GPT issue was what was causing Windows to refuse to work with the disks properly. In Linux it just meant I had to use GParted instead of FDisk. Given that GParted has a nice GUI, I wasn't really complaining.

Since Linux had no trouble detecting the enclosure or seeing the 4 drives (USB support even for USB 3 has come along nicely), my RAID experience was reduced to:

1) Setup each of the hard drives (/dev/sde - /dev/sdh in my case) with a single ext4 partition using GParted.
2) Open a terminal window and type:
sudo mdadm --create --verbose --auto=yes /dev/md0 --level=0 --raid-devices=4 /dev/sde1 /dev/sdf1 /dev/sdg1 /dev/sdh1

Note that you can change level if you prefer something other than RAID 0 (common choices are 1 and 5), and the raid-devices options should be appropriate for the number of disks you're using.

3) Once it is completed , type in the same window:
sudo mkfs -t ext4 /dev/md0

Ubuntu will format and then mount the drive in /media/ as the UUID that was assigned to the md0 device. You can then play with mount as seems appropriate. As the above should imply, this actually is fairly easy and I really should have done this sooner.

This isn't to say that software RAID is a complete replacement - my speeds for the current copy are staying between 30 mb/s - 40 mb/s so I am obviously giving up a bit of performance. However it takes the week long copy down to just under a day, and that is reasonably acceptable downtime even at places I've worked for a 4-5TB copy.

Once I have completed the copy it will be time to address the challenge that made me give up on Ubuntu the last time - mapping a Windows network drive. More on that soon I'm sure.