[Discuss] NAS: lots of bays vs. lots of boxes

[kentborg at borg.org (Kent Borg)]

On 07/07/2015 01:19 PM, Derek Atkins wrote:
> The 24-bay NORCO box is under $400.

Jeepers. A few numbers in a calculator and I have to remind myself we 
are talking TB not mere GB.

Feels like RAID is dying of disks being too inexpensive, or better put, 
too big at a still-affordable price. The amount of data to copy to bring 
a new disk into an existing array is getting too big. It takes too long, 
it starts to consume too much of the disks' life span--both the old 
disks that have to serve up their entire contents for the newcomer, and 
the newcomer that starts life being entirely written in a long, hot effort.

I'm going to have to spend some effort to wrap my brain around things 
like btrfs. And storage models that are not in the file system tradition.

24-disks is enough to be pretty interesting and Newegg will sell 1TB 
drives for under $50 each. A pretty interesting and capable testbed 
could be had for not that much money.

-kb, the Kent who doesn't have the time.