Displaying items by tag: RAID

As 2013 comes to a close we have a new contest to help you bring in 2014 with your own private cloud. Synology has given us a DS1513+ (diskless) to give to the person that can gather all of the information we will be asking for. The contest will involve a scavenger hunt on DecrytedTech, our YouTube channel and Synology’s product pages. You can also get additional chances to win by liking our Facebook page, Joining and posting in the contest thread on our Forum. With that, here are the questions and good luck!

Now that we have shown you the tear down of the Synology DS1513+ we have to show you if all of the hard work and attention to detail pay off in the form of performance and ease of use. There is nothing like getting a product and finding out that you have to read a huge manual just to change the IP address on it. So out goal now is to tear down the operating system and hardware performance in the same manner that we did the physical box. Let’s get started shall we?

We have our third victim… um test subject in our continuing Network Attached Storage (NAS) device reviews. This time it is from a company with a fair recognizable name in the industry, NETGEAR. For many the name NETGEAR means low cost consumer networking products and maybe a lower reliability rating. We have to agree that some of that reputation was rightfully earned in the past, but they have since changed things around and are now making some fairly solid products for the consumer, SMBs and the enterprise. We have already covered their ProSafe WNDAP360 wireless access point and found it to be a well put together product. Now we are going to dive into their pro line of NAS products with the ReadNAS Pro 6. This is a 6 bay device that can support up to 12TB of RAW storage and has more than its share of features to boot. So let’s take a look at what you get with the ReadyNAS Pro 6 from NETGEAR.

When I first got into the IT game the storage needs of even large companies could be maintained in less space than what typically fits on a CD-ROM. In fact all of the applications that we used in the shop fit onto 20 3.25-inch 720KB floppy disks! Now you would be hard pressed to store one or two Word documents on even one of those floppies. Fortunately as our storage requirements have grown so have the devices we keep all that data on. For most home users simply dropping in a 1 or 2 Terabyte hard drive will be enough, but for businesses, prosumers and enthusiasts might need a bit more. For this there are products that can be attached to a normal home or office network that offer extra storage (and many other functions) to meet these needs. Synology is a maker of NAS (Network Attached Storage) devices. The idea of the NAS is not new, nor is it a business only product. There have been multiple consumer level NAS devices. The one we have in from Synology is a little outside the normal home environment. This is the Disk Station 1512+ it is a 5-Bay, Dual-Lan, Network Storage device that has some great hardware and software features in store of anyone picking this product up. We will be taking a look at the hardware used inside, the build and some of the basic features in this part of our coverage. So let’s get started.
You can check out the performance half of this review here

There is RAID and then there is RAID!. Well IBM has the latter that is a conglomerate of 200,000 disk drives combined together to make up a 120 Petabyte (not to be confused with Pedabite which has to do with chewing on feet) drive array. IBM built this to accumulate data for weather simulations. We imagine that these would be more than answering what the temp will be on Monday but will likely be for long-term forecast models and of course everyone favorite; global warming.

The array is going to an as yet unnamed client of IBM’s but IBM did say that one day (in the far far future maybe) cloud systems would all have similar storage arrays. For those interested this is not a giant JBOD or even RAID 50 array. This is something new called GPFS that allows the system to almost self-heal. If a single disk begins to fail the system can move the data slowly to a ready spare without the normal rebuild times you expect from other arrays. It can also spread files across multiple disks allow extremely fast read/write/index times.

I wonder if I can put something like this together in the garage…

Dsicuss in our Forum