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End of the road for 5U servers?

josh

josh

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Question for the group. Do you think we've seen the end of product development (read, higher capacity drives) for the 5U form factor?

I'm wondering if we'll ever see 1Tb drives for the 5U. It's possible Kaleidescape just doesn't have a big incentive to develop anything more for the 5U. Jim (Cinelife) suggested to me that a large portion of 5U servers are close to full so the market for 1Tb 5U drives might be too small to justify the sourcing, development and testing resources?

And remember the Kaleidescape doesn't advise doing "up-swaps" (pulling out a drive and replacing it with a higher capacity drive and letting it rebuild itself to give more capacity.)

If most owners aren't "techie" enough to just try an up-swap, (we know it's possible, and probably pretty safe) then the market for 5U-1Tb drives may indeed be small. And it doesn't escape me that K would certainly rather us buy a new server when we're out of room.

(but if Kscape is listening, count me in for three 5U 1Tb disks!)

--josh
 
I certainly hope they do allow upgrades of 5U drives to 1 TB. I currently have a 5U server with 6 750 GB drives and 6 400 GB drives. I currently have about 1.5 TB of free space left but I am an avid movie buyer and just added the music module to my system a week ago, so that space will continue to dwindle quickly in the future. I understand about the ?hot swap? issue and that they would prefer to sell an add-on server. However, I will personally be disappointed if they don?t allow an upgrade of the 5U server. What about those individuals who may have originally put in all 400 GB drives? I am not sure a ?hot swap?, if done properly is all that dangerous. Computer systems all over the world use RAID drives and I am sure many of them have had drives go bad and had to replace them. While there may be some that don?t do it correctly and lose data or have a second drive go bad before the first drive is replaced or while the replaced drive is being replaced, that is probably a very small minority of the users. I guess I don?t really understand what is different between a ?hot swap? and a situation where KScape becomes aware that one of your existing drives is going bad and they send a replacement drive to your dealer for him to replace. As long as you have the server on a UPS (to protect against power outage while the RAID is working) and don?t otherwise use the server while the drive is being repopulated (to allow the server to spend its whole time on the repopulation), I would think any risk would be very minimal. To a large extent KScape probably discourages ?hot swaps? because some lawyer (I am a lawyer so I can say this) tells them that if some user doesn?t do it correctly or something very unusual happens during the repopulation, KScape can then just say, ?we told you not to do this, so it?s not our fault you lost your movies/music?.

If Kscape is concerned that an end user won't do it properly, they certainly should feel comfortable enough with their dealers doing it and that would be a win-win for both KScape and the dealer (this could be a value-added service by the dealer which could charge a fee if the dealer wanted).

If/when importing of HD DVD and Blu -ray discs becomes available, this will really become a big issue.

I am also interested in what others think about this issue.

Scott
 
OK, some bad news here...

we can wish all we want, but I just heard officially from a top executive at Kaleidescape... there will not be 1TB drives for the 5U servers.

This isn't because they don't want to do it, but the 5U servers are PATA (parallel ATA) and Kaleidescape's disk suppliers are not even manufacturing 1TB PATA drives, only SATA drives. The 1U and 3U servers use SATA drives.

So 750s will be the largest drives for the 5U servers.

Sorry to break the bad news...

--josh
 
You beat me to it Josh! Yes, unfortunately 750 is as high as we will get with the 5U's.

Not a huge problem when working with standard DVD, but clearly affects top end storage for HD-DVD/BR, when we get there. (Of course given the speed at which we are moving toward K HD capability, we'll all have plenty of time to save for a new 3U.:D)

Jim
 
That is certainly disappointing news, but certainly very understandable. Any chance they may want to sell the "outdated" 750 GB PATA drives at a good price for those of us who at least want to be able to upgrade the 250 GB and 400 GB drives we currently have in our 5U servers?

Does anyone know the advantages/disadvantages of PATA drives vs. SATA drives (i.e. drive access speed, reliability, etc.)?

Scott
 
sshearer said:
That is certainly disappointing news, but certainly very understandable. Any chance they may want to sell the "outdated" 750 GB PATA drives at a good price for those of us who at least want to be able to upgrade the 250 GB and 400 GB drives we currently have in our 5U servers?

Does anyone know the advantages/disadvantages of PATA drives vs. SATA drives (i.e. drive access speed, reliability, etc.)?

Scott
Click to expand...

From K's standpoint the single most important factor for the use of SATA drives is the "hot swap" capability, which is not available with PATA.

Jim
 
Jim,

Thanks for the response. That certainly makes sense to me and can certainly see why that is important to K.

Scott
 
This is an old thread, but thought I would post something. The PATA drives certainly can be hot swapped. Most RAID controllers cannot hot swap PATA drives but I do recall some that did - one of which I used on a server I built before I got a Kaleidescape.

I have also been upsizing my drives as they fail and I will say that one gets a little nervous between the time a drive fails and a new drive has been rebuilt. Might be better if you replaced them pre-emptively if you don't want to sweat the thought of reloading your collection.
 
Nice to hear from you Mike. I for one consider you an authority in this area. I'm still running 5U's as well. I have my own reasons for liking those servers, but the hot swap (on 3U's) is a nice feature for sure.

Jim
 
Last edited:
Mike, that's the first report I've heard of someone actually doing the upsizing of their drives... nice to finally hear from someone that it does in fact work.

I'm not sure I follow your second statement about doing it pre-emptively if it scares you to think of reloading your whole collection. How is a pre-emptive drive removal and upswapping any less dangerous than replacing a failed hard disk? After all, I'm pretty sure once it starts its process, you couldn't put that old drive back in anyway... right? Pulling a drive and putting in a new larger one is just as fragile and dangerous I think. If any drive fails during the replacement, your collection is hosed and I don't think you can undo it by putting back the original (smaller) drive in the slot.
 
Very interesting. I am looking forward to Mike's reply as I would have the same question. I think the obvious thing is- one should absolutely have a battery backup power supply.
 
josh said:
I'm not sure I follow your second statement about doing it pre-emptively if it scares you to think of reloading your whole collection. How is a pre-emptive drive removal and upswapping any less dangerous than replacing a failed hard disk? After all, I'm pretty sure once it starts its process, you couldn't put that old drive back in anyway... right?
Click to expand...

If you remove a disk for longer than a specific time threshold, the system goes into a degraded state and will have to rebuild the data once the disk is reinserted or replaced with a new one. If you re-insert the original disk, it will still need to be rebuilt. So you *can* change your mind and return the original disk but the system will still be in a degraded state until it completely rebuilds the data on that disk.

Pulling a drive and putting in a new larger one is just as fragile and dangerous I think. If any drive fails during the replacement, your collection is hosed and I don't think you can undo it by putting back the original (smaller) drive in the slot.
Click to expand...

Correct. Once a server experiences a double disk failure, it will need to be RMAed to get it back up and running.
 
Given the information being discussed here (swapping drives), a couple of important points need to made.

First, it is NEVER advisable to start preemptively swapping drives. This of course causes the content represented in that drive to have to be rebuilt. Although the rebuilding capability exists, it is really only there as an emergency response to prevent data loss. It is NOT intended to be a routine process. Anytime content has to be rewritten the file system undergoes some degree of stress. Content is being read and written from many different drives and the heads are working "overtime" to accomplish this process. You may have drives in your system that have been degraded over time for a variety of reasons (i.e. bad spots on the drive due to head to disk contact from server movement, etc.) and involving these drives in the rebuild process COULD cause them to fail. This would result in a complete loss of content, would likely involve a server return, and at a minimum your content would have to be reimported. Not fun. To be as safe as possible, consider the RAID capability an emergency provision and treat it that way.

Also, just for info, the time delay Croptop mentioned is 30 seconds. That delay is built in to allow for the inadvertent removal of a drive and quick reinsertion to prevent the server from instantly entering into degraded mode which would then trigger a rebuild. Once a rebuild starts you cannot just reinsert that drive and return to normal. However, if the removed drive is still a good drive, after rebuild you can reinsert it to allow it to be identified as the new "hot spare."

"Let's be safe out there":D

Jim
 
The reason a pre-emptive drive upgrade would be less of a worry is that in such a scenerio, one would pull a functional drive and put in a new drive and the rebuild would take like 20 hours or so I believe (based on recollection of how long it took my system on average). That is 20 hours of system vulnerability during an intensive rebuild process.

If you wait for a drive to fail, you have the same 20 hour intensive rebuild process PLUS the few days it will take for a replacement drive to get shipped out, delivered to you, unpacked and placed in the server.

And just to clarify something on the 3U vs. the 5U, it isn't a hot swap feature the 3U has over the 5U because they BOTH have that. The 3U can have a "hot spare" which allows a rebuild as soon as a drive fails. Incidentally, that has the same chance of failure one would get with the pre-emptive drive upsizing.

What you do have to deal with using a pre-emptive upsizing swap is that you are replacing drives sooner. How much sooner is up for debate, but say a drive will last on average 4 +/-1 years and you replace them after 3 pre-emptively. In the course of 6 years, you have gone through 6 more rebuilds than a normally serviced fully populated 5U server on average. These numbers are just made up like 87% of statistics are, but the math behind it is sound and so the conclusions should be as well. It is just a matter of how close to normal replacement time you get that determines how much more often you stress your raid than you need to.
 
It is also worth noting that while I cannot really say to the kids "The kaleidescape is degraded right now so no movie watching" because they are 2 and 4 and totally know their role in the family as my boss (pecking order is wife, kids, me).

So, while we are always using the Kaleidescape, reads are pretty mellow. Writing is more intensive as it writes to the disk as well as to the parity drive. I do not do any content importing during a rebuild. While I am sure the system could handle it, I know it will add to the rebuild time which I try to minimize to get back to a healthy system faster.
 
Mr.Poindexter said:
I do not do any content importing during a rebuild. While I am sure the system could handle it, I know it will add to the rebuild time which I try to minimize to get back to a healthy system faster.
Click to expand...

You actually *can't* import content while a server is degraded or a disk is rebuilding. KEAOS has been specifically designed to prevent this. The only exception to this is if a disk fails *while* a DVD/CD is importing. In that case, KEAOS will allow the import to complete. Once that import completes, no other imports will be possible until the system is healthy again.
 
Some things you just don't know if you don't try. Thought it was a bad idea to begin with so great minds think alike I guess.
 
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