LaCie bigs up 2big, 5big, 8big... WHOMP: Lands big data on your desk

Seagate sub LaCie has announced 2big, 5big and 8big products using 6TB disks and Thunderbolt connects for stonking big fat and fast performance. That’s 12TB in the 2-drive 2big, 30TB in the 5big and 48TB in the 8big rackmount shelf. LaCie says the 8big is its first rackmount Thunderbolt 2 connect product. The 2big transfers …

[Lusty]

I'm amazed they support RAID 5 for large drives, nobody else in the industry does any more for drives greater than 2TB due to the probability of data loss.

couldn't see any link with big data other than the strap line either, and it's a bit of a pet peeve when people use it to just mean large capacity which has nothing to do with big data...

[ColonelClaw]

With regards to the RAID 5 support, many of these devices will typically end up in the broadcast edit suite shops found all over areas of digital creation (Soho, LA etc), where they will be connected to non-linear editing systems. This data is extremely transient in it's nature, so perhaps the need for bullet-proof reliabilty is less important?

[Lusty]

I very much doubt that transient video editing will use massive slow SATA disk as the bandwidth isn't very high. I could be wrong as I'm not really close to that market, but a recent customer was talking about large arrays of SSD for video editing since the advent of 4k and 8k.

[phil dude]

amateur option but...

I'm a complete amateur but the way I understood it is that the chance of disk failing is not the issue. It is the chance the multiple failures will occur within the rebuild window for the FS in play.

RAID 5 has one failure allowed, hence if you are using a 4TB drive that takes (I have no idea, 24h? someone?) then a second failure will result in data loss.

RAID6 is better since you can have multiple failures but I the recovery time would eventually become a problem depending on drive size.

It would be interesting to here the prevailing advice for HomeNAS of say 16TB or so, the configurations that make sense? It would seem RAID1 and RAID6 are the only "safe" ones.

Oh and a tape backup....!

P.

[Justin Stringfellow]

Re: amateur option but...

Good point.

Rebuild duration is a "piece of string" question - might be quick if your array is idle, but if not... your guess is as good as any.

[Lusty]

Re: amateur option but...

That's the one. One of our guys said the probability of successfully reading and rebuilding the data set is around 90% if you do the maths for a RAID 5 array of >2TB disks. Most vendors have therefore dropped support for RAID 5 on these disks, even to the point of making some customers re-stripe the arrays.

[Ian Michael Gumby]

Re: amateur option but...

Raid 10?

But you need 4 drives.

If you're going with LaCie, you will want to use raid.

[RobHib]

RAID 0 -- Of course it will.

Note that hot-swapping these drives with a RAID 0 configuration will cause data loss - ouch.

Of course it will. Bit difficult to stripe without a drive. Not a good idea to hot swap other drives in RAID either. Mind you, I'd be very happy to own that setup. ;-)