So many things use snapshots under the hood, space can grow and shrink pretty rapidly in confusing ways.

How did this project go?

Did you end up getting this to work?

I still have it around if you want to test.

@alvama said:

Scott, thank you for your topic. I am planning new installation and comparing between RAID 10 and RAID 5 on ssd drives. What do you think about stripe size and TBW for two types of raid? Do you know what size of blocks will be written on disks if service (sql for example) writes 8Kb on volume. For raid10 I think it will be two 8K blocks on mirror disks. But for RAID 5 it will be two blocks with size=stripe size and may be 32 or 64K. And in raid5 configuration TBW limit will be reached faster.

I'm not Scott but in your context RAID5 seems to be preferred. Because 1) Flash and not spinning disk used so typical parity RAID issues associated with high-capacity spinners are gone (see URL below) 2) Database logs are sequential writes of a big sizes so should "touch" maximum amount of spinners possible and because of sequential nature read-modify-write is not going to happen and 3) RAID5 gives you write performance of (N-1) and RAID10 does (N/2) (where N = amount of spinners).

https://slog.starwindsoftware.com/raid-5-was-great-until-high-capacity-hdds-came-into-play-but-ssds-restored-its-former-glory/

Good luck 🙂

@DustinB3403 said:

So you could use something like WinSCP to connect to Amazon S3 service of yours assuming its configured as NFS / SMB Share and copy down or upload your file(s).

No, there are a couple things wrong here.

NFS / SMB are network file systems, not block storage. So this goes against what you posted in the line about about using whatever filesystem you want which means block storage. Neither block storage nor network file storage is an option on any of these products. Nor would you want it as even NFS is horribly weak over a WAN link and SMB is far worse.

WinSCP is a tool for SFTP, FTPS, SCP and FTP usage, not SMB or NFS. So that isn't the right tool in any circumstance here.

Those little Atom processors that they tend to use (I miss the Sparc32 days, it was just more interesting) use very little electrical power and produce very little heat and tend to last for forever. Pretty much unbeatable.

We will be waiting quite some time to see how 6.0 shakes out before we touch any of ours

@scottalanmiller Planning to start it this week.

I'm still finding parts to use. Trying to be as cost conscious as possible as this is only my home lab. (and the significant other gets testy when I want to "buy toys")

He's from NZ. We've spoken offline before.

@scottalanmiller said:

SATA SSDs often make sense because they are cheaper and the protocol benefits of SAS really are not there in the same ways for SSDs.

So this brings up @DustinB3403 question of best practice or more aptly as you @scottalanmiller said implementation patterns - which ones as generically as you can be would go which way. I suppose it might be easier to say 'in these set of circumstances (list 1-4) you do this, generally in the rest you do that.'

@Dashrender said:

@scottalanmiller said:

@Dashrender said:

I can see doing RAID 6 if you can afford the performance penalty.

Which you would assume that you can if you can wait for a distant node to write as well.

By distant, you mean local, as in the same rack?

Yes, distant meaning outside of the chassis connected over a slow Ethernet link.

@scottalanmiller I think of Snapshots as a quick point-in-time view... if something breaks, I can restore that snapshot in mere seconds, and I'm good to go.

If I have to pull a full image from a backup, it could take minutes - hours to restore that backup...

I would recommend looking at StarWind SA for example.
That solution fits your requirements perfectly, it will also provide you with HA storage that will ensure the business continuity.
As for support, they offer a single point of contact no matter what issue you face, plus the system will be shipped to your site fully preconfigured and pretested.

@DustinB3403 said in SAM-SD Hardware Server Vendors:

@scottalanmiller is there a ballpark entry price for SAM-SD hardware? Are you approving all of all the systems designed? Or did you simply license the term (like Trump) licenses his name?

Prices will be available soon. It's full support, real support unlike SMB devices. So not super cheap 🙂

Sounds like a win.

Thanks!

Yup, our security guy is a big believer in "Linus' law": "many eyeballs make all bugs shallow" or something like that 😄