Hardware for MogileFS

Jay Buffington jaybuffington at gmail.com
Wed Oct 26 11:40:47 PDT 2005


I read about internet archive's new petabox:
http://www.archive.org/web/petabox.php

Capricorn Technologies (http://www.capricorn-tech.com/) makes these. 
They cram 2 terabytes (4 500gb drives I assume) in to 1U and it only
takes 80 watts.

If I were to build a petabyte (or even 100 terabytes) for use with
mogilefs it would make sense use higher density boxes with cheaper
hardware.

For example:
* 300 gb Maxtor 6L300R0 (about 40 cents per gigabyte)
* AIC RMC5D2-XP 5U chassis - holds 48 drives, costs about $3500:
http://www.aicipc.com/productDetail.asp?id=164
* Highpoint RocketRAID 2240 16-port SATA RAID

(300gb * 48 drives) / 5U = 2880gb per 1U

Each drive takes a max of about 10W.  Assuming the other components
take 120W  (its probably much lower than this) we get:

      (10W * 48 drives + 120W) / (300gb * 48 drives)
=~ 600W / 14.4tb
=~ 42 watts per terabyte

Which is comparable to the 40 watts per terabyte of the capricorn box.
 This configuration would be just as reliable but much cheaper than
Capricorn tech's.

Thoughts?
Jay


More information about the mogilefs mailing list