Comment by buro9 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by buro9 | Hacker News Reader

A single Ikea desk, beside a window that has good blinds, on the 19th floor of a building with a view over North London.

Under the desk a UPS, NAS (18TB RAID6), the WiFi plus a single powerful workstation (16-core, 192GB RAM, SSD for main drive, 6TB RAID0 scratch disks).

On the desk some books, a bottle of single malt whisky, a playstation (dusty and not wired up) and a scanner. A single large monitor (high quality). A desk lamp with halogen bulb.

My home office is just a corner of a room, with all the tools I need nearby.

It is slightly messy, I tend to have mail opened on the desk, and small things around it.

It's comfortable, a place I enjoy being.

But it's also a work zone... my viewing of videos and entertainment is on a television purposefully not visible from the desk. Meaning I must leave the work environment to enjoy entertainment with others.

I'm not fortunate enough to be able to create a study room that could be an office. Space is limited, but the ideal would be a comfortable library space, lit well enough (but not enough to harm the books), and quiet.

You need a NAS when you have 18TB in your main machine? How big is the NAS?

Corrected, the NAS is 18TB, in the workstation the disks are RAID0 for fast scratch (creating and destroying virtual machines).

Cool. How do you get to 18TB RAID6? 8 3TB drives? 11 2TB? What hardware/OS are you using for that?

8 x 3TB in one of these: http://www.qnap.com/uk/index.php?lang=en-uk&sn=5050&c=2485&s...

The NAS, whilst it is feature rich, I've disabled everything other then full-disk encryption. The only thing running on it is Squeezebox: http://oinkzwurgl.org/ssods_intro

Interesting, thanks. I originally got a 4 drive QNAP but it's way too limited in terms of CPU, it couldn't keep up with rsync+ssh transfers. I ended up replacing it with a HP microserver and am very happy with it. So far 4 drives in RAID6 have been enough but it would be nice to have versions with more drives. I guess I could fit a 5th drive in the optical drive slot.

Edit: I see that these Pro QNAP versions are actually high-specced and high-priced Intel machines. The HP microservers still hit a sweet spot of low price and ECC ram though. QNAP must be making a bundle by effectively differentiating themselves in their software. Nothing in the hardware seems to justify the pricing.

I'm on a N40L and found that FDE taxed the CPU too much underneath a RAID 6 array to be useful. I've heard that the more recent models are CPU upgradable to CPUs with AES-NI. What sort of FDE R/W speeds are you seeing?

I don't use encryption. I just checked my munin graphs and the CPU sits ~90% idle, and this is on a N36L, I guess the newer N56L would be better.

It seems the newer generation has moved to Intel but still without AES-NI:

https://ssl.www8.hp.com/us/en/products/proliant-servers/prod...

It's not clear from what I've read if you can swap the processor out.

Why do you run FDE? How do you boot it?

I don't run FDE, because it's too slow to do so (by around 1 order of magnitude IIRC).

See http://b3n.org/installed-xeon-e3-1230v2-in-gen8-hp-microserv... for info on how to do the chip upgrades in the current model.

Looks straightforward. Why would you want FDE in this context?

wow, what do you need the 192GB of RAM for?

I suppose virtual machines. Tons of virtual machines.

Simulations?

Firefox.

Nah, those days are gone... I bought the machine when working on my MSc project as it worked out to be similar in price to renting AWS machines at the time for the duration of the project and work.

I needed 20+ virtual machines to be running, for a long period of time (3-6 months), gathering and processing data, to perform various experiments during the project.

The crux of it was that as AWS would cost me the same ballpark as 6 consumer desktops or 1 professional workstation, that I might as well buy and own the hardware.

Then the choice was between 6 consumer machines all using energy and producing noise + heat, or the 1 workstation (idling most of the time). I chose the workstation as it would be more flexible in the future (now).

The workstation has lasted years and is still a superb workhorse. I'd go this route again as it's proved great value for money and still has years in it.

It's an older HP Z800, runs Linux now but used to run Windows.

Some sort of RAMDisk is my guess.

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