Answering Questions about the PetaPi | Hacker News Reader

Answering Questions about the PetaPi

jeffgeerling.com

78 pointsingve12 comments

Thanks! I stumbled across this post and thought the controller model numbers sounded familiar, but from 3Ware not Broadcom. So I googled a bit and learned that 3Ware was acquired by Broadcom (via LSI).

I still have a few older 3Ware cards that I haven't used in over five years. IMHO they were (and maybe still are) the best hardware RAID solution available, and Linux support was always great.

And not only that, Broadcom is now a subsidiary of Avago!

It seems like in networking, AI, and storage, it's buyouts all the way down these days.

>How much power does it use? 502W with all drives spinning at idle, 516W during a RAID 0 benchmark, and 640W peak (as measured) during the final batch of drive spinups at boot. If I only run 15 drives, it runs around 200W. So with 60 drives and a Raspberry Pi as the CPU, this XL60 chassis will eat up around 360 kWh per month.

I guess if I could afford 60 drives, the electricity cost wouldn't phase me, but 360 kWh would more than double my electricity usage!

> the configuration I have runs about $50,000

That is a lot of money to build for fun.

You can spend that much on an Austin Healey that isn't even in that great of shape.

People have weird hobbies, but most of that money went somewhere.

I’m pretty sure Jeff got 45Drives.com to sponsor this by sending him the hardware for free.

This is correct; they originally sponsored the first video (for trade), I forgot to mention they provided the hardware in this follow-up post.

I'll try to remember to add that disclaimer to the post.

Hehe, the signal integrity stuff can really bite if using those cheap USB3.0 extenders.

Glad to see that the forcimg the link from PCIe 2.0 to PCIe 1.0 made it far more reliable.

Why????

Before you buy a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 and connect it to sixty 20TB hard drives, try this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxmjy1nz6MM

It is not as exciting, but you may actually be able to find and afford the parts. .

You're right that the Raspberry Pi has become so difficult to find now that I am playing with Teensys again. Probably should experiment with the Raspberry Pi Pico.

I'm pretty sure this is only meant as a tech demo; the "Future Plans" section calls out that the author doesn't actually have enough files to really use that much storage, and the whole thing sounds like "hey, how much storage can you attach to this little thing?"

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