Talk:Vblade - ATA over Ethernet

Comparision
This isn't really a fair comparision for cost at all, after all Coraid's devices are SATA and Gigabit Ethernet optimized. But still it's a fun comparision to see what opensource hardware and software can get you.

15 blades no included hard drives
15 blades x 750GB = max 11.25TB

Coraid

 * SATA Storage - SR1520
 * Total: $3996

Kurobox + Netgear Switch

 * 15 Kuro Box HG WR vblades
 * 15 x $149 each = $2235
 * NETGEAR GS116 16-port Gigabit Switch 10/100/1000 Mbps
 * $167
 * Total:$2402

Savings
Open Source Saves you $1594

Conclusion
As I said certainly not a fair comparison, the Coraid hardware is different (SATA vs PATA) and optimized from a ethernet switching standpoint vs the Kurobox/Linkstation. But still a savings of $1600 is nothing to sneeze at!

- Ramuk 23:57, 27 August 2006 (EDT)

At 1000Mb/s / 8bits/Byte / 15 kuroboxes = 8.33 MB/Sec needed in transfer rate per kurobox RAIDed together to completely soak a 1Gb/s ethernet connection. Seems like it could be doable expecially with XFS....hmmmmmmmm

- Ramuk 02:17, 28 August 2006 (EDT)

My Setup

 * 1) USB Drive
 * 2) I bricked my LS when trying to mount an internal partition the first time I tried this, so I used a usb drive this time around. Which on my LinkStation was /dev/sda1 - Ramuk
 * 3) My Client
 * 4) In this case I have a PIII/600 Compaq Armada laptop running Ubuntu Dapper Drake. - Ramuk

Transfer speeds

 * Very interesting indeed. Mounting a 20 GB USB 2.0 External Drive over a 100baseT switch using the  StarPort software from Rocket Division Software on a Windows XP computer I was able to get a sustained 4 Megabyte/sec or 32 MB/s transfer rate..... not too bad.  I'll have to try it with a EXT3 block device and a Unix computer. Ramuk 01:36, 29 August 2006 (EDT)


 * EXT3 - Slightly dissapointing, however one would have to know what leveraging several of these devices together would get you. Using my ubuntu laptop attached via a 100baseT switch,  transferring a 300Mb file I got about a 5Mb/s sustained transfer rate. Which does correlate well with Coraid's suggestion of 5-6Mb/s per blade.  So 15 of these devices in a Level 5 raid array should produce (14*5*8) = 560MB/s transfer rate, which is about half the bandwidth of a Gigabit 1000MB/s switch.  02:01, 29 August 2006 (EDT)