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  • deanjo
    replied
    Originally posted by stevea View Post
    Deanjo,

    There is no 7200.12 with 1.5TB size and never was. Some websites speculate Seagate may release one, but currently the 1.5TB Seagates are the 7200.11 (firmware problems) or 5900.12 (5900rpm, low power). You have misidentified your troubled product, and you have now misinformed & confused others. You should be more careful & accurate when you badmouth a product.

    It's silly to drop Seagate b/c of one troubled product like the 7200.11. If you look at storagereview.com you will clearly see that every disk manufacturer WD, Hitachi, Fujitsu, Maxtor have had "klinker" product families. When it becomes a pattern then it might make sense, but that is not the case for Seagate. WD is IMO worse, and Hitachi has had more spectacular disk-family failures.

    Also important to me is that the 7200.11 fiasco was due to firmware and not a mechanical issue. It appears that Seagate shipped the original 7200.11s with a firmware problem that could cause permanent failure. The first updated firmware had an equally evil bug. Reports indicate the 3rd firmware set for this family is fine, but I have no direct experience. I'd rather just avoid that line and get the lower power and generally higher performance 7200.12s

    It's also the reason you should do some homework before buying any drive. The customer reviews of newegg or the forums of storagereview would have allowed you to easily avoid your bad experience.

    -S
    Right looking back at the receipts the 7200.12 that died in 48 hours were 1TB's. They were replacing the "fixed" 1.5TB - 7200.11's. as well as a bunch of 500GB 7200.11's.

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  • stevea
    replied
    Originally posted by deanjo View Post
    I would stay away from the 7200.12's as well. I've personally had a couple of 1.5 TB drives 7200.12's that died (bad sectors) within a period of 48 hours of being used bought from two different suppliers. I was asking my local supplier about them as well and I guess the RMA rate on them is so high that they are going to drop the seagate line all together.
    Deanjo,

    There is no 7200.12 with 1.5TB size and never was. Some websites speculate Seagate may release one, but currently the 1.5TB Seagates are the 7200.11 (firmware problems) or 5900.12 (5900rpm, low power). You have misidentified your troubled product, and you have now misinformed & confused others. You should be more careful & accurate when you badmouth a product.

    It's silly to drop Seagate b/c of one troubled product like the 7200.11. If you look at storagereview.com you will clearly see that every disk manufacturer WD, Hitachi, Fujitsu, Maxtor have had "klinker" product families. When it becomes a pattern then it might make sense, but that is not the case for Seagate. WD is IMO worse, and Hitachi has had more spectacular disk-family failures.

    Also important to me is that the 7200.11 fiasco was due to firmware and not a mechanical issue. It appears that Seagate shipped the original 7200.11s with a firmware problem that could cause permanent failure. The first updated firmware had an equally evil bug. Reports indicate the 3rd firmware set for this family is fine, but I have no direct experience. I'd rather just avoid that line and get the lower power and generally higher performance 7200.12s

    It's also the reason you should do some homework before buying any drive. The customer reviews of newegg or the forums of storagereview would have allowed you to easily avoid your bad experience.

    -S
    Last edited by stevea; 07 July 2009, 03:38 PM.

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  • movieman
    replied
    Yeah, it doesn't appear to have any ATA or LAN interface, which isn't exactly good news for a server .

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  • movieman
    replied
    Originally posted by gururise View Post
    Its a fanless single board computer based on the Arm Cortex-A8 core. Costs $149, idles at 1 watt (5 watts at max CPU) and is probably about as fast as an Atom based computer.
    In my experience of ARM embedded systems I doubt a 600MHz ARM and attached DSP is as fast as a dual-core Ion system. Certainly if you want CPU performance the ARM is going to struggle to keep up with a dual-core, quad-thread x86 running nearly three times as fast.

    I did look at the Beagle Board at one stage, but from what I remember it doesn't enough I/O to make a viable server.

    Leave a comment:


  • gururise
    replied
    What exactly are you going to be doing with your server? That will determine whether or not you need a 5050e. While the low power parts from AMD tied with a descent IGP motherboard (780g) are excellent parts, your still probably looking at a total system idle of between 45 - 65 watts (depending on the efficiency of your power supply).

    Have you looked at the BeagleBoard? Its a fanless single board computer based on the Arm Cortex-A8 core. Costs $149, idles at 1 watt (5 watts at max CPU) and is probably about as fast as an Atom based computer. If it has enough power for your needs, you may consider it, as it is silent (passively cooled). You can run Ubuntu, OpenEmbedded or Android on it. Has a DSP core, people are watching 1080p video on it.
    Last edited by gururise; 01 July 2009, 02:27 PM.

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  • deanjo
    replied
    Originally posted by stevea View Post
    Yes these run about 8/5.0 Watt at active/idle, but I have fears about the 7200.11 firmware problems and would prefer the 7200.12 which are still lower power.
    I would stay away from the 7200.12's as well. I've personally had a couple of 1.5 TB drives 7200.12's that died (bad sectors) within a period of 48 hours of being used bought from two different suppliers. I was asking my local supplier about them as well and I guess the RMA rate on them is so high that they are going to drop the seagate line all together.

    Leave a comment:


  • stevea
    replied
    To Curaga - *ALL* GigE chips use DMA and nearly all offload checksumming and some I P& multicast subscribing too. It's been two decades since I've seem a LANCE design where the CPU passes the enet data.

    Originally posted by Adarion View Post
    Well the VIA boards with padlock suck up few power for an x86 so if the implemented (hardware supported) algorithm is fine for you then it could be the best solution since
    I'm not completely satisfied with hardware crypto, since the crypto required may change over time. Also these low-end CPUs do not perform well in NAS applications (see smallnetbuilder.com for comparisons). Maybe a better VIA mobo would help, but they seem unavailable here.

    I agree that waiting for a great embedded NAS board may be an intolerable wait.

    Power supplies are still an issue, since most normal PC ones tend to be available in horrible dimensions of 450 and far above
    I completely agree. Who needs these 850W PS ??? Most PC PS operate most efficiently around 65-85% of stated capacity, and most systems have an initial power draw that is the maximum draw. So the goal is to choose the minimum sufficient PS capacity to get past startup. Of course a little headroom for upgrades is desirable

    I recently purchased a 'kill-a-watt' power meter and applied this to two systems. My current server (3x disks, 2 in standby, 2.66Ghz P4HT 65W TPD, 1 GB DRAM), has an idle consumption around 66W, and at CPU load ~112W, then about 4 extra watts if I hit the disk hard. I expected this system would have idled over 100W so this was a shock. So my estimate is that the idle CPU (no speedstep or hibernate) uses only around 20-25W. The load CPU power is obviously limited around 65WTPD. So I don't believe that switching to the AMD part will offer much idle power saving, but will offer a lot more saving at load. Since my current system power is surprisingly low, I will implement the full functionality on this system as-is and then measure the average power - and only then make a decision to replace the mobo&cpu.

    The other surprise is that my workstation system (3x disks in a RAID0, 2.66Ghz E6700 Core2Duo, 6GM DRAM) uses ~132W at idle and ~210W at full load, peaking around 240W at startup. I could easily use a 300W PS on this heavy-duty system.

    On the Seagates: I was referring to the 320GB 7200.11 model (1 disc spinning)
    Yes these run about 8/5.0 Watt at active/idle, but I have fears about the 7200.11 firmware problems and would prefer the 7200.12 which are still lower power.

    Leave a comment:


  • Adarion
    replied
    Well the VIA boards with padlock suck up few power for an x86 so if the implemented (hardware supported) algorithm is fine for you then it could be the best solution since the padlock should do very fine on encryption while the VIA C7 CPUs are capable of normal tasks while sucking up few Watts but not good for more intensive computing.
    Still needs comparison of the different vendors/boards and they're not all great.
    If you dislike the HW crypto chips then the AMD 4850e/5050e should be the best, reliable and still cheap solution on today's market.
    Power supplies are still an issue, since most normal PC ones tend to be available in horrible dimensions of 450 and far above which no sensible box will ever use but these micro PSUs are rare and expensive. I personally go with some 350/400 ones with 80+/85+ rating. And there was a test in Germany's probably best allround computer mag (c't by heise press) some time ago which showed the efficiencies under low, medium and high load. So I took their results as a base for my decisions. And my PSUs give quite a good picture in efficiency even on low load.

    Of course you could wait some time until something better arrives or the non-x86-embedded ones get better in terms of storage and expansability but I made the experience that you will wait far longer than you expected and wanted and you still don't have your machine.
    There will always be some sour grape in the bunch of them.

    On the Seagates: I was referring to the 320GB 7200.11 model (1 disc spinning) which should still be low on energy consumption 8lower than the average 7200.11 series and most earlier series). Otherwise I just put a reiser3.6 on a 500GB 7200.12 today for this one shall become my main storage operating drive. Sure, these 7200.12 are better on power usage below the line. But so they are supposed to do since these are the newer models and finally vendors (besides GPU vendors... :/ ) go for the energy efficiency.
    But it's awesome to see such a lot of specs published. I mean that's truly something to make up a decision.

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  • curaga
    replied
    Beyond the normal chipset differences, with higher cost "server" ethernet chips being orders faster, the better class also supports DMA offloading.

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  • stevea
    replied
    Seagate is my preference too, but ...



    The 7200.11 uses 11.16/7.96 Watt operating/idle
    The 7200.12 uses 6.57/5.0 Watt operating/idle
    In standby they are 0.99 & 0.79 W respectively.
    BTW most vendors do not publish such complete specs.

    So the 7200.12 is low power but the 7200.11 is not.

    Also there have been numerous firmware problems reported against the 7200.11. The 7200.12 has a clean record. You'd be well advised to read storagereview.com and also look for customer reviews befor buying any disk.
    ====

    Yes there are less expensive development boards, but usually with fewer features and more difficult to support features, I've used products like these before.
    Products Single Board Computers (SBCs) SBC Microcontroller iPac-9302 iPac-HCS12 MicroPac 515C MircoPac HC16 486 Single Board Computers VDX-6324 VDX-6327 VDX-6328 VDX-6350 VDX-6353 VDX-6354 VSX-6124 VSX-6127

    but you will find that if these are built to any standard, like PC104, that the price will far exceed a PC mobo. If it's a "one off" board it will not have the features and expandability I need. Yes there are often(usually) still problems integrating PCI parts onto MIPS, ARM or PPC architectures. You'd be surprised at some of the headaches. To start with all x86 PCs integrate PCI into the support chips, bbut most embedded parts use any of a number of offchip parts. The utility & performance of the PCI is quite dependent on the hw & sw implementation.

    If I had the luxury of selecting the CPU and chipset and the board features this could be a good solution. Finding an appropriate board offered a la carte isn't likely.
    =====

    Your complaint against RAID1 is like complaining that milk is white.
    >a) twice the price, but only one time storage
    >b) twice the power, heat, noise
    Yes double the power and cost buys you e' = 1-(1-e)^2 the error rate. That is why we consider RAID. Your typical ~1.5% failures/year translates to 0.0225% failures/year in RAID1. The 750Khr mttf would become 23M hr mttf.((note you will have double the component failure rate, but only a microscopic chance of data loss)). It costs double for this boon.

    >c) it's only pure HW failure reliability. If a program runs amok, ...
    It is not news that RAID *IS NOT* a backup. A RAID creates reliable storage only. No one should think otherwise.

    Yes, one of the disk reliability papers notes that if one disk in a RAID fails there is a 39 times greater probability of failure. This is still a major decrease in data loss probability. They think this may be due to problem systems - bad power or frequent power losses.


    To save power perhap I should create a RAID1 for an archival backup disk pair instead. These disk will be in standby (very low power) except during backup, perhaps daily. Then periodic offsite backups from there. This means that the local archival backup is stored with great reliability. I can afford to lose anything else. The backup pair will consume very low average power due to the low duty cycle.

    Also consider the real price. 2 1T seagate 7200.12's in a fully active RAID1 cost $180 capital and consume 10.32W (10% active time). At my current rate for 5yr 24x7 operation that's an additional $53.25 for power (a little more for added cooling). So I can operate a 1TB RAID1 for 5yrs at ~$225 - that's quite a bit cheaper than a non-RAID 1TB across 2 -500GB disks from 18 months ago.
    ======

    I'm not a fan of crypto hardware generally either. Several times there have been implementation bugs, or a once secure crypto becomes no-longer safe. You consume power constantly for an intermittent task. I might feel differently if there was a extremely low power elliptical curve crypto at a low price ... but software seems cheaper in the long run.

    It is true that I am rejecting some low-end processors, even the intel Atom based on performance. Yes the crypto task is one major reason, but not the only one. If you read smallnetbuilder website (link given before) you will see that many NAS boxes have low performance despite adequate disks and GigE networks. It appears that the basic I/O performance, perhaps interrupt handling is a limiting factor. I know there is a significant differnet in GigE performance in Linux based on the specific driver/chipset. I wish there was a good analysis of what this bottleneck is.

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