storage arrays???

[x98gulinski]

What are they, and what can they be used for in a home environment? Or could someone tell me where to find good info on them and such...????? Thanks

[x98gulinski]

Anyone know anything about the subject? There's gotta be a storage person here......

[Ice Czar]

answering such broad questions entails writing a book

the three basic categories would be DAS NAS SAN

Direct Attached Storage
Network Attached Storage
Storage Attached Network

an Array generally implies RAID
(see the Adavnced HDD Issues Stcky thread)

there are three basic types of RAID implementation
1. Standalone RAID solutions for mass storage in the backplane of servers (fiber channel-attached) or Network-Attached Storage (NAS) connected via Firewire or Gigabit Ethernet.

2. RAID functionality via separate Host Bus Adapter (HBA) cards using PCI, PCI-X (64bit / 66 MHz) or PCI-Express (3GIO) interface.

3. RAID controller integrated on the mainboard level. Often called RAID-lite because of limited functionality, except for dedicated Server boards. RAID on Mainboard (ROMB).


attach a 2nd HDD to a computer and you have DAS
that can ramp up to a huge number of drives attached to a local computer

[animeguru]

Basically it's a box of HDDs that connects to your computer/server/network by various means. It's used as a means of adding storage to your systems/network. As Ice said, there are a number of different interfaces that you can use, but I think the ones you see around here are mostly SCSI or Fibre Channel.

For example, I run an external SCSI array in a RAID 5 configuration. It's attached to my server via a SCSI cable connecting to a SCSI RAID card.

Front View
http://www.animeguru.com/images/server2as.jpg (http://www.animeguru.com/images/server2a.jpg)

Each of those caddies hold a 36 gig SCSI HDD.


Inside View
http://www.animeguru.com/images/server2bs.jpg (http://www.animeguru.com/images/server2b.jpg)

You can see that they're all connected together here. At one end of the brown cable, there is an external cable that connects to my server (not shown). Thus, I have added 8 more HDDs to my server (which was running out of space... already has 10 HDDs in it).

[x98gulinski]

That is exactly the information I was looking for, thanks,

[soulax]

Does that box pictured above have an OS installed? Or it just connects to another box via SCSI (which has the OS)

How does one of these boxes connect to a LAN, does it have some sort of small OS that provides TCP/IP ?

[animeguru]

Originally posted by soulax
Does that box pictured above have an OS installed? Or it just connects to another box via SCSI (which has the OS)

How does one of these boxes connect to a LAN, does it have some sort of small OS that provides TCP/IP ?


It has no OS. It is merely a box of HDDs and a power supply. It connects to a server via a SCSI cable. That server actually controlls the array.

This particular box is viewed as HDDs on the server. However, there are some arrays out there that connect directly to your network. They usually have a RJ45 connection and a basic firmware that actually controlls them.

Look for NAS or Network Attached Storage (which technically mine is since it's really only used over my network). You'll find stuff like this (http://++++++++++++/yuuju) .