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July 27, 2008

more decentralisation

so i spent about $600 and got two sata-2 samsung 750 gig 7200 rpm disks with 32 megs of cache each as well as a synology ds 207+. i looked at the reviews on newegg and the specs and it looked like a good enough unit, but what really won me over was the description of the bundled software (yes, really) on the synology website. it seemed to me like someone inside the company really understood what it means to be a network software (e.g. gmail) developer today, and thankfully ($600 later) it turned out i was right - the software is amazing:

nas_dstation_settings.png
nas_dstation_tasks.png
nas_network.png
nas_status.png
nas_terminal.png
nas_volume.png
nas_winmac.png

as you can see, i set up the disks in a raid1. this is the new sda project drive ("p"), replacing an old sata 500 gig in v5 (my hp pc). unfortunately the old 500 started locking up a few months ago and after it did it three times last week i decided i had better not wait any longer. i do daily backups of all the in-progress sda stuff but i didn't want to work off of the backup if i could avoid it, which i did. actually even now i'm not sure whether the lockups were caused by the drive, the cable or the controller (on the hp motherboard) but to be honest i don't have the time to be troubleshooting things like that, especially when the lockups are more or less random. also no matter the outcome i would have had to have spent money anyway so i felt this purchase, subsidized 50% with sda funds (even though i have no reason to buy it except sda), was inevitable.

softwarewise:

BusyBox v1.1.0 (2008.06.20-16:34+0000) Built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.

p> uname -a

Linux p 2.6.15 #639 Sat Jun 21 00:30:16 CST 2008 armv5tejl unknown

p> 

i have to say that the built in torrent client (rtorrent with the web gui) isn't bad. the only thing that seems to be missing is down/up rate caps in the web gui (it may be available in the windoze-only standalone app - i haven't checked) but it's not the end of the world. having the torrent client run on the same machine as the project drive is important and this morning i was able to shut down v5 for the first time in years, which was pretty cool (literally). it's by far the biggest power user out of all the v6 machines (by perhaps an order of magnitude - the other three are two laptops and a mac mini) so having it off when i'm not encoding is a boon.

the nas looks like it has a ~2 gig solid state drive for its software, which comes as an image file which is then flashed to it over the network (it doesn't come with any software preloaded, just a disc with an image on it to get you started). upgrades happen this way as well - of course i updated it to the latest after i got it and it worked great from my mac.

p> df -h
Filesystem                Size      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/md0                  2.3G    235.0M      2.1G  10% /
/tmp                     62.0M    108.0k     61.9M   0% /tmp
/dev/md2                684.7G     38.8G    645.9G   6% /volume1
p> 

overall i'm quite pleased with it. it works as advertised.

Posted by njahnke at July 27, 2008 1:00 PM

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