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Comment by wmf | Hacker News Reader

Supermicro has a 45-bay JBOD that should be under 10 cents/GB populated: http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/4U/?chs=847

HP has a 70-bay JBOD that works out to under 30 cents/GB: http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF25a/12169-304616-3...

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It's also worth looking at their 72 disk, 2.5" version

http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/4U/417/SC417E16-R...

Using that, and 72 1TB 2.5" drives, (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136...)

(($109 * 72) / (72 * 1TB * .75) in dollars per gigabyte) = $.15/Gb

Yeah, basically 2.5" gives you the same space but twice the spindles for twice the price. Probably not worth it for archival storage.

Agreed. It'd be faster, but that's not really what we're looking for- We want to get the cost per GB to be as low as humanly possible, while maintaining at least an illusion of reliability.

So store it all on one of those fake Chinese USB drives. That gives a nice illusion, and is incredibly cheap...

Alternatively we could consider what level of reliability you want and how that will be tested.

In my calculations I was doing elsewhere in the thread, I was assuming 1 drive out of 4 would be for redundancy. There's nothing on these drives that's irreplaceable, and we have system-level redundancy.

It's worth noting at this time, that most SSDs only come in a 2.5" version. (Not for cheap bulk storage but because that's arguable Supermicro's intentions for this chassis.)

No its not intended for SSDs. There is not nearly enough IO bandwidth for SSD to make any sense. 2.5 inch hard drives are what you use if you want disks with spindles not just big storage. Eg for virtualised database servers.

The Supermicro case is pretty awesome. It looks like it might be a great option- It's almost exactly what I was looking for.. Half a step above custom frames. Thanks!

It doesn't feel like 2 years worth of progress, though- The numbers are pretty much still where they were 2 years ago ;)

Thanks Again.

You should have a look at a Silicon Mechanics[0] and Aberdeen[1]. I know Aberdeen sells re-branded Supermicro chassis, but Silicon Mechanics sells similar products. I've been shopping around for a 36 bay NAS, and both companies seem to offer the best combination of price, quality, and support (Aberdeen has a 5 year warranty). Though if you want to ditch enterprise drives entirely to minimize cost, you should probably go with a Silicon Mechanics system and buy your own drives.

Some quick estimates: You can get a 36 bay server with an attached 45 bay JBOD for about 8.5k [2]. If you use 2TB consumer drives, they'll run about $140 a piece[3]. This comes out to $0.12 / GB, which is a damn good deal, IMO.

[0] http://www.siliconmechanics.com/

[1] http://www.aberdeeninc.com/

[2] http://www.siliconmechanics.com/i28693/4u-storage-server.php and http://www.siliconmechanics.com/i19897/4u-45-drive-jbod-sas-...

[3] WD Caviar Black drives ( http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx? Item=N82E16822136824 ). You can get WD Greens for $80 a piece, but I don't know how their variable RPM holds up in a RAID.

Agreed. I like Silicon Mechanics, Also used Avadirect in the past, but they weren't as good.

I think the WD's are the way to go. Enterprise-grade drives aren't really much more reliable, and you need to plan capacity assuming they'll fail anyway. Better to get consumer drives that are at least mid-range (avoid Hitachi), and run with it.

That looks cool.

Where did you get the pricing from, to generate your cost estimates (ie. the 10/30c/gig)?

If you throw the serial number into google, you get a few resellers-

http://www.google.com/search?q=SC847E16-RJBOD1&ie=utf-8&...

2K - Case + Backplanes 1K - CPU, MB, RAM 3.3K - 45 1TB drives at 75 ea --

6.6K - 45TB RAID0 If I want it to be even somewhat sane, I'd add every 4th drive as spare/parity, which drops to 33G

$6600 / 35TB gives $.19/GB

That's higher than the .12 from the 2 year old BackBlaze box, but not much.

If instead we go with the $179 3TB WD drives, we can get slightly better than the pod pricing.

($179 * 45) / (45 * 3TB * .75) in dollars per gigabyte = $.08/GB

It's a shame that nobody has a chassis like the sun fire 4500 anymore. The closest I could find is a 5U Thinkmate STX XA48-2510 which would work out at about 32 cents/GB.

How much would the associated electricity and cooling costs be?

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