I'm in the process of replacing a dead XServe at work with a new Mini server, and am a little stuck on what to use for external storage.
We have enough data that the internal drives won't cut it, and on our XServe I had an external JBOD SATA enclosure hooked to an eSATA card, and used SoftRAID to mirror the data drives. This setup ran smoothly for several years, and I was very happy with it.
eSATA obviously isn't an option on a mini, so I was initially planning on getting a 2-bay FW800 box that would do JBOD and use SoftRAID to mirror the two drives, until I discovered one thing and realized a second: It's surprisingly hard to find a FW800 enclosure that allows JBOD, and, more importantly, being that there's only a single FW800 interface I'm going to be halving my throughput since it's going to be writing to both drives simultaneously.
Now, I'm assuming that a unit that does hardware RAID1 would allow reads and writes at full speed, since the RAID work will happen at the controller after the data hits the box. I have a cheap OWC Mercury Pro onhand that I'm in the process of setting up, but I'm not really happy with it--no notifications, no error checking, and very little feedback about what's up with the array.
So: Any recommendations for a good, fast, but most importantly beefy FW800 RAID1 unit?
Price is a lot less important than reliability and error reporting. Speed is nice, but since it's only feeding 100Mbit users and the data access isn't that heavy, it's not the primary concern.
Any experiences or suggestions hugely appreciated!
We have enough data that the internal drives won't cut it, and on our XServe I had an external JBOD SATA enclosure hooked to an eSATA card, and used SoftRAID to mirror the data drives. This setup ran smoothly for several years, and I was very happy with it.
eSATA obviously isn't an option on a mini, so I was initially planning on getting a 2-bay FW800 box that would do JBOD and use SoftRAID to mirror the two drives, until I discovered one thing and realized a second: It's surprisingly hard to find a FW800 enclosure that allows JBOD, and, more importantly, being that there's only a single FW800 interface I'm going to be halving my throughput since it's going to be writing to both drives simultaneously.
Now, I'm assuming that a unit that does hardware RAID1 would allow reads and writes at full speed, since the RAID work will happen at the controller after the data hits the box. I have a cheap OWC Mercury Pro onhand that I'm in the process of setting up, but I'm not really happy with it--no notifications, no error checking, and very little feedback about what's up with the array.
So: Any recommendations for a good, fast, but most importantly beefy FW800 RAID1 unit?
Price is a lot less important than reliability and error reporting. Speed is nice, but since it's only feeding 100Mbit users and the data access isn't that heavy, it's not the primary concern.
Any experiences or suggestions hugely appreciated!