Storage and Servers

[M-Callahan]

Mr. Callahan, all that sounds right do-able and very very cool!   I thought my own rig with 3 to 4 terabytes internal storage was great.  But even that is beginning to fill up.  So.  Time to go external for more, I think!  But rather than spinner drives, I am looking at static RAM storage.    SSD's.  I know, Solid State Drives.  But they ARE Static RAM!  LOL!  I am delighted that they have come way down in price while their reliability has gone up, and capacity has increased too.Have a great evening!

Hello McG 



SATA drives cost less than SAS drives.  Both of these type of drives are mechanical and Solid State.  The reason why SAS cost so much is that it can read and write at the basically at the same time, where the SATA can only read or write taking turns or can only take one function at a time.  I would like to have solid state sas drives but it would cost a small fortune to get them, for me it is more practical to get mechanical drive that are refurbished when it comes to SAS drives.   I have a SATA solid state as a boot disk in my home built, it is very fast with the i5 processor on an MSI gaming board.  They do have their advantages.  With 15 external drive I have outside my computer with wires all over the place I feel that it is time to get a server network.  Servers very strong computers that have built in redundancy.  They will keep running if something burn out on one side like and it will tell you if something is wrong with it has fault lights and small screen in them that will give an error code so it help in times you need to repair or correct a fault in the programming.  There is so much information on the internet about servers and networks and the different type of networks that all you have to do is read, and/or watch tutorials  and check everything you do carefully to put you own network together.  Plus there are people on forums and websites that will help you if you are stuck somewhere since  there are people who put together networks as a hobby.

[McGrandpa]

Mr. Callahan, all that sounds right do-able and very very cool!   I thought my own rig with 3 to 4 terabytes internal storage was great.  But even that is beginning to fill up.  So.  Time to go external for more, I think!  But rather than spinner drives, I am looking at static RAM storage.    SSD's.  I know, Solid State Drives.  But they ARE Static RAM!  LOL!  I am delighted that they have come way down in price while their reliability has gone up, and capacity has increased too.Have a great evening!

[M-Callahan]

Hello everyone,


Hope everyone is doing fine.



Since animation takes up quite a bit of disk space, I am starting to set up servers.  Will be frankensteining a SAN network (Storage Area Network) with a dell t710 and a t610 servers that are modified for rack mounts and starting out with a Emc VNX 5300 array with 15 sas 3.5 inch disk drive bays at two terabytes each to start with one block  (switch gear between the servers and storage) and a hub (where the san can connect to the computers in the network)  so other spare workstations can be used here to render and still be able to use the internet at the same time. One could have done a NAS (network attached storage)  system but the fact that if the one server goes down you can also lose the whole network and sometime data, with the extra server you can keep going save some money and replace the servers. ( about $250 to $350 is what servers go for if you know where to find them to replace a down server and who knows one might be able to do simple repair on the down server and keep in reserve.)   Now I am learning how to setup servers and program in Linux.  All my equipment is beyond end of life but it is really affordable when you get equipment that is over 10 years old which cost a fortune when it was new.  With the use raid five for the disk it will leave me 15 terabytes to work with and be able to backup files. (Raid backs up data so if one disk goes down you don't loose data or files. Raid 5 uses about 50 percent of disk space but is usually considered as one of the most reliable in this system. )  My plan is to get more drive arrays as soon as my saving allow me so in order to expand to 200 terabytes as a hobbyist hopefully that will be enough to have 100 terabytes to work with.   ( However there was a time in the late 70s and early 80s when I thought 5 megabytes was more than enough for storage when most file were in kilobytes.)  Now to remember the importance of Cable Management as this network goes together.