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From: Wolfgang Draxinger on 29 Dec 2007 06:17
For a NAS system I'm going to build for a photographer¹ I'm
looking for a mainboard, that provides at least four PCI-Express
4x slots for SATA2 or SAS controllers. CPU Socket may be either
940 (AMD Opteron) or 775 (Intel Core 2). There shall be no fancy
OnBoard stuff, like multimedia hardware.

No need for PCI slots, though having one (but not more) may come
handy for POST-80 diagnosis.

Ideally the board has IEEE1394 (FireWire) connectors, to connect
external HDDs used for backup.

On the storage side I want to use Linux Software RAID, since this
makes the system independent of a hardware vendor's RAID
solution and is more flexible to configure. So what I need are
SATA2 or SAS controllers, that provide very good I/O throughput,
but hardware RAID functionality is not needed. Of course they
should be Hot Plug capable (the swapping works in my experience
quite well in the Linux software RAID) and are well supported by
Linux.

And then of course the harddisks, for which I need of course
reliable ones (ideally 750GB capacity or more).

Network connection is of course by GBit ethernet. I'm thinking of
a Intel 4x NIC which can be connection bonded easyly. Good idea?

What can you recommend: Mainboard, Controller, HDDs, NIC?

¹ the guy currently has about 3TiB of image data on several
external HDDs (the IEEE1394 ones, that shall be used for
backup), and wants some central storage, that appears like a
harddisk on his Macs. But he has no idea of how to administrate
computer systems, so any of the storage systems you can buy of
the shelf, but need extra configuration on both the server and
client side are a No-Go. This should become a PnP solution: just
connect the thing into the network, boot it up and let the NAS
appear on the MacOS X desktop using Avahi protocoll. And any PnP
solution you can buy (or which I know) can't deal with the
amount of data (the largest PnP NAS I've seen provides 4TB max,
but the guy wants to extend up to 10TB in the near future). And
none of the NAS solutions I know about, provides backup through
external HDD functionality.

Wolfgang Draxinger
--
E-Mail address works, Jabber: hexarith(a)jabber.org, ICQ: 134682867

From: Anton Ertl on 29 Dec 2007 12:21
Wolfgang Draxinger <wdraxinger(a)darkstargames.de> writes:
>For a NAS system I'm going to build for a photographer=C2=B9 I'm
>looking for a mainboard, that provides at least four PCI-Express
>4x slots for SATA2 or SAS controllers.

Given that you are then funneling the data through Gb Ethernet,
requiring PCIe 4x for the controllers seems to be overkill. Of
course, if you already have a particular controller in mind, things
may be different. If not, chose the controller before chosing the
board: Some controllers require PCIe x1, some PCIe x4, and some PCIe
x8.

>CPU Socket may be either
>940 (AMD Opteron)

That's outdated, Opterons have been using Socket F (1207) for a while.

- anton
--
M. Anton Ertl Some things have to be seen to be believed
anton(a)mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at Most things have to be believed to be seen
http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/home.html
From: Trevor Hemsley on 29 Dec 2007 17:00
On Sat, 29 Dec 2007 11:17:55 UTC in comp.os.linux.hardware, Wolfgang Draxinger
<wdraxinger(a)darkstargames.de> wrote:

> For a NAS system I'm going to build for a photographer� I'm
> looking for a mainboard, that provides at least four PCI-Express
> 4x slots for SATA2 or SAS controllers.

How many drives are you aiming to hang off this? My Intel D975XBX2 (for example)
has 8 SATA2 ports out of the box. I suspect that other recent boards will have
similar amounts. If you use the onboard ports as well then you can probably
reduce the number of slots you need for extra controllers.

--
Trevor Hemsley, Brighton, UK
Trevor dot Hemsley at ntlworld dot com
From: Wolfgang Draxinger on 30 Dec 2007 07:00
* wrote:

> Reminding everybody that external drives are for backup purpose
> only, and shall not be switched on usually otherwise will
> quickly fry, he claims to have 3TB storage occupied. Now,
> 12Mpixel raw+jpg file takes about 22M each, so we're talking
> about more than 130k photos, a huge number. I cannot understand
> why one wants to have them online all the time. Spending just
> 1" to merely watch the photo will take 1.5 days of continuous
> work. Even if he shoots video only, a dvd is about 4G, still
> more than 700 Hollywood films on 3TB.

You're thinking of digital SLR cameras. However this guy is
working with huge format cameras. One image easyly has 20k x 10k
pixels, i.e. 200Mpixel.

One application is e.g. product photography, so that you can zoom
deep into the pictures. Another are ultra high resolution
panorama images, which are then printed on walls. You stand in
the middle of a room and see the panorama of a city, but then
you near the picture to 30cm and can clearly recognize every
detail.

Wolfgang Draxinger
--
E-Mail address works, Jabber: hexarith(a)jabber.org, ICQ: 134682867

From: jeroentenberge on 31 Dec 2007 07:49
Should this be a quiet solution ? If not, supermicro has a nice
storage solution where you can put in 16 SATA or SAS disks, if it
contains hardware raid, that's also a non-issue since you'll be able
to use JBOD mode, having linux handle the raid functionality, with
16x750GB you can use RAID5 with a hot spare...
The chassis also has quite a few PCI/PCI-X slots, however i didn't
look for further details, it showed up in our dutch C'T magazine.

I can help you out more directly if you contact me directly since i
don't visit these newsgroups frequently, you can get my phone number
after replying directly to me.

Regards,
Jeroen.
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