STEVE CASSIDY
Steve welcomes a nearly new £60 workstation into his bulging work room and then populates it with an 18TB drive worth over £500
Steve welcomes a nearly new £60 workstation into his bulging work room and then populates it with an 18TB drive worth over £500.
I’m banned from taking pictures of my work room at the moment. That’s the effect of delicate, artistic sensibilities being presented with the grim truth of what happens after almost five months of obligatory isolation – and the minor side issue of partners who don’t even want to look in there, not for a second, either in reality or on the pages of a magazine. That’s because there’s nothing like sitting at home for turning your mind to hardware purchases.
I know, everything’s in the cloud, right? Nobody ought to be wandering around with anything larger than a smartphone these days. But nobody expected to have to work from home; not in a messy, fragmented way with different rules applied with different levels of severity in different regions of the country. I heard plenty of stories from businesses around the UK telling me the biggest single reason to move from the cloud was so they could plan their network, storage and services with the maximum flexibility from resources they could scrape together.
Those options are driven by hardware. I’m increasingly hearing of the concept of “cloud repatriation” –the movement of compute back from the cloud to the premises, as servers and software both become less of a nightmare to choose, setup and control.
My hardware month started with a spend of just £60. Not because I had a grand plan in mind, but because the various sellers of nearly-new machinery started to offer unmissably attractive rates. This normally results in me shoehorning a 16-core monster into a client’s server room, claiming that it will be fine for the next release of VMware or some ill-advised foray into supercomputing VMs courtesy of VirtualBox. But as with every other “normal” in 2020, this time the rules didn’t apply, and I found myself looking with some interest at the Dell Precision T1600 workstation. It was available as a shell, with CPU but no memory, for £60.
That CPU was one of the later Xeons, an E3 series with a decent amount of cache spread over three different levels. Lots of online reviews groaned about the cost of “server memory” for this combination of motherboard and CPU, but I already had 12GB of the right stuff from a defunct and unacceptably noisy 1U rackmount. The deal was done and, two days later, I was chopping through the gaffer tape and cardboard padding to reveal a pristine, silverfronted workstation PC.
Which is when I did the wrong thing. Even though I’d bought the
Dell with the idea that it would be a showcase device for NAS software, I idly ran through the Windows 10 setup, feeding it the Windows 7 COA key still on the bottom of the case of this machine. As with other wellregarded brands I’ve tried lately, the old key still loads up the new OS,
“There’s nothing like sitting at home for turning your mind to hardware”
without annoying warnings or accusations of victimhood, but with a series of long waits for the two major later patch releases to be queued up and downloaded. For me, this is just a case of having the screen switched on over my left shoulder while I am working on something else, turning around to occasionally click “OK” or “Restart now”.
But I soon had good reason to rue my decision. I should instead have been burning various USB keys with new bootable loaders for my selected NAS OSes for testing because, quite out of the blue, a long and background conversation with Seagate about its new IronWolf NAS drives suddenly bore fruit. Two fruit, to be specific.
I find the NAS marketplace a total puzzle. NAS devices are, by design, less capable than a regular PC in terms of horsepower, power consumption and expandability. The few machines that can be upgraded are only like that because they use laptop RAM sockets. The even fewer that can be bought naked and then populated with your disks are incredibly difficult to identify from gazing at specs sheets online. Moreover, the prices are either astronomically absurd or so low you have to take a long hard look at why they suddenly became so cheap (normally it’s because a new model came out).
Nonetheless, we must understand these things and try to stop them from being thrown angrily into the Cupboard of Shame – an all too common fate for ones I find at the businesses I visit. This can happen because the configuration software is wilfully perverse or it can be operator error: consider the brave little Synology I found that was carefully ordered with two disks to take advantage of its mirror capability. After all, everything the firm had created was stored on it. There was one problem: nobody turned on the mirror. For some five years, only one SATA drive was in use.
Back to my main point. If there’s one thing that defines the basic, everlasting apparent division between Windows as a server, and NAS boxes in general, it’s that NASes seem to get by with almost no main system memory at all. To serve a stack of disks in Windows Server, the mantra used to be 1GB of RAM per terabyte of disk: almost every decent NAS has busted out of that formula right from day one. 2GB is a very well-populated NAS device indeed, without referring to the drives or drive sizes at all. More memory is, obviously, worth something to them, if you happen to find one that will let you make an upgrade, but it’s not as vital as it is in Windows.
So when Seagate told me about its new 18TB IronWolf 3.5in old-school spinning magnetic hard drive, I was gripped by the Imp of the Perverse once again, and said “thanks lads, good timing in late summer with almost nothing going on, but I don’t really think I could do much of a hardcore review with only one drive. If you could send two, I have the chance of comparing RAID formation and NAS box use and all that good stuff, which is the environment they really should be used in.”
And Seagate did.
Pumping some IronWolf
Maybe it was a silly season thing or a call-his-bluff type of response, but the big cardboard box had two drives in there, for a nominal capacity of 36TB. That’s 140% of the storage I have scattered around the server room, but I have 20 drives RAIDed over two servers, three NAS boxes and a couple of old boat-anchor externals for the Macs to achieve that total. Let me reiterate: this delivery gave me almost one and a half times the space in just two disks.
Admittedly, these are not lik like the wobbly old pile p of 250GB drives I have by the doo door, stripped out of grumbling old machines decommissioned decommissione by corporate customers with a data-destruction data-destructio obsession. You can see that the IronWolf casing looks inflated, pushing the spinning-disk space sp right out to the edges of the 3.5i 3.5in disk envelope.
The IronWolf’s connectors are standard SATA, and there’s nothing to show any difference in presentation on the outside.
So, of course, I then did the wrong thing. In setting up the test, I’d been chatting with Jon Honeyball and Paul Ockenden – both not inclined to hold back with their opinions on architectures and hardware – and we all seemed to experience a brief moment of agreement that these monstrous drives were going to need some cutting-edge bits of kit to ensure proper evaluation. 10GbE, said Jon, nominating the eight-bay Synology that has 10GbE included as the only sensible test device for drives of this size. I wasn’t going to disagree with him and, in a normal year, I probably would have gone to Synology and asked for its help – but this was the lockdown summer, and I had plenty of time on my hands to complete the evaluation. Instead, I threw one 18TB drive into the humble Dell Precision T1600 I’d bought for £60 a few weeks before, plugging it into the power and SATA data for the CD drive. And it worked. Why is this so amazing, Steve? It’s amazing because I also have a lot of other her machines – PCs, Macs and NAS devices – in which it would not have worked, at all. Most of them have a disk controller ler BIOS