Tiny SATA to USB3, with 3.5″ drive support
This looks good. Measuring 75 x 38 x 17mm and weighing a mere 23g, the tiny adapter allows users to connect their 2.5”/ 3.5” SATA devices (e.g. HDD, SSD) to a PC (via USB 3.0) at data transfer speeds of up to 128Mb/s (read) and 95Mb/s (write). The GBox Mini, backward compatible with all USB 2.0 and USB 1.1 ports, is bundled with DriveClone 7 Pro and data transfer cables. It is expected to hit store shelves in Japan come July at a MSRP of USD 22.
Super storage server?
I've been looking for a nice storage solution for a while now. I may well have found it. The combination of the SC846E1 + 9690SA-4I seems good. Looking on google, it seems that the chassis and controller can be had for £1137 and £187 respectively. Given that WD 2TB green drives can be had for about £90 (£2160 for 24). Tallying up, that gives you 48TB for £3484. You'll have to add a mobo chip and ram to that, but that can be had quite cheaply depending on what sort of processing power you need.
As far as a filesystem goes, until btrfs is ready it's got to be zfs, it provides block level deduplication, and much better big volume management than any other stable fs i have seen. This can be achieved with nexentia, which combines the opensolaris kernel with the debian userspace. They even have a NexentiaStor Community edition, which is a web GUI based NAS solution. The only free NAS distro to support zfs I have seen.
To SSD or not to SSD?
Hmm, SSD prices are falling, capacities are increasing, and reliabliuty sees to be getting better, although it's still to early to tell what the long term performance will be like.
Toms has a fairly decent roundup of current drives, and excluding the Asax (which seems to be unavailable in the UK, the best drive seems to be the Crucial M225 256GB. If you hunt, you can find this for about £400 ex vat.
I've been putting off upgrading to snowleopard because of all the tweaks I have made to my leopard install (I've just about gotten comfortable in it) but one of these may tip the balance. I have been p***ed off recently with the time it takes for the box to change between firefox and textmate. I'm actually starting to sympathise with all tose graphic designers that whine about the beachball of doom.
I’m an idiot. I just bought the wrong type of SCSI disks, again.
Damn it.
I needed SCA, and i bought normal 68pin type. SCA are the top in this image.
Hopefully I'll remember to come look here next time.
Storing Data For The Next 1000 Years
Tom's has a nice article on a bit of research done on data storage
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/harddrive-storage-hdd,news-28035.html
Pergamum, named after the ancient Greek library that made the
transition from fragile papyrus to more durable parchment, is designed
as a distributed network of individually fully functional network
storage devices. Compared to current MAIDs (Massive Arrays of Idle
Disks), NAND flash memory (described as on-volatile random access
memory - NVRAM) within the project has been added to each node with the
purpose to store data signatures, metadata, and other small items,
allowing deferred writes, metadata requests and inter-disk data
verification to be performed while the disk is powered off. Since the
NVRAM can run frequent searches without the need to spin up a hard
drive, the disk media can remain powered down more often, effectively
reducing wear as well as the power consumption of a MAID.
Rename hardware devices (like eth0) using udev for linux
shamelesly stolen
udev is a daemon which dynamically creates and removes
device nodes from /dev/, handles hotplug events and loads drivers at
boot time. It replaces the hotplug package and requires a kernel not
older than 2.6.12.udev - /dev/ and hotplug management daemon
EqualLogic
Been looking for some SAN boxes for a while, Quite like the look of EqualLogic's PS50E.
PuppetMaster – Bluetooth/GPRS Remote Control for Windows
Control your pc from your mobile (media remote, powerpoint an ting)
PuppetMaster - Bluetooth/GPRS Remote Control for Windows