Storage done cheap

While strugling with my home storage and in search of a good online backup solution I ran into a blog posts which I really like, and what I like I put on my own blog:

Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage

Basically what these people did is built their own storage. For a tiny fraction of the price of a “real” storage. Yes you don’t get the service, support and warranty. But built two to have a spare and you’ll still be paying nothing compared to all the big brands. Okay maybe you don’t really want to use this for your business critical data. But isn’t this ideal as a magnetic backup library(to temporary store you files before you write them to disk), for that archived data that is now sitting on your expensive Equallogic?  And maybe you’re just a storage hungry home user that needs lots of TBs but could not afford it yet?

HP G6 server with and without Smart Array Battery Kit ESXi i/o performance

No IO performance in ESXi on a high spec HP DL380 server was caused by not having the Smart Array battery kit installed. Installing the 512 cache module wasn’t enough, performance as expected came after adding the battery kit.

Read/write performance without battery kit:

Read/write performance with battery kit:

Tested on a brand new HP DL380(Quad Core Xeon, 8GB memory and 146GB 10K disks, P410i smart array(firmware v3.00)) running ESXi 4.1

ATTO Disk Benchmark

Looking for a simple, quick and free disk benchmark utility to test your new hard drive, SAN, NAS, Virtual Machine  read/write performce? Go for ATTO Disk Benchmark!

Visit the official website for the latest version.

Or click here for a direct download.