Brian's Brain

I've been dealing with low-level stress for the past three years. Wait, don't leave....you haven't accidentally stumbled across some obscure support group website. This is the Brian's Brian blog, and the tale I'm about to share will likely be of interest to you, dear reader. For it concerns technology....specifically, my NAS.

In mid-2002 I bought, and began using, a Toshiba Magnia SG10 network appliance. For all intents and purposes a keyboard-, mouse- and monitor-less PC running a now-ancient revision of Red Hat Linux, the SG10 at first was a pretty slick machine; attractive to the eye, reasonably quiet, fairly low power, and capable of numerous functions beyond file serving....POP3 and SMTP email serving, FTP serving, Apache-based web serving, print serving, etc.

Unfortunately, Toshiba quit patching the O/S shortly after I bought the SG10, and consequent security concerns precluded me from exposing it beyond the safe confines of my firewall-protected LAN. Ordinarily, I could have addressed these concerns by putting another Linux distro, or alternatively a different OS such as Windows 2000 or XP, on the SG10....but Toshiba refused to publicly release the proprietary source code for the routines that controlled the SG10's system fans and LCD interface.

Security concerns weren't the long-lasting stress source, though. For that, turn your attention to the SG10's (along with followon SG20, SG25 and SG30's) hard drive subsystem. Whereas most servers employ beefy 3.5" HDDs, the SG10 minimized the system size by relying on 2.5" HDDs (two maximum per system). Laptop-architected HDDs aren't designed (either from performance or reliability perspectives) for 24/7 operation and the heavy read/write workloads that servers experience. 2.5" HDDs are also at a notable capacity and capacity-per-dollar deficit compared to 3.5" counterparts, and the Linux variant running on the SG10 didn't support drive partitions larger than 32 GBytes. And, perhaps of greatest concern, Webmin reported that the SG10 wasn't capable of running the drives in redundant RAID 1 mode.

So, let's summarize. I could only store and ready back a limited number of audio, still image, video and other files on the SG10. Slowly. And those files were a single HDD crash away from being permanently obliterated. The SG10 was, in effect, a ticking time bomb, because as we all know, disk crashes are a matter of 'when', not 'if'. Therein lay the stress. A few weeks ago, I decided to do something about my condition. Several of my computers (my Dell PowerEdge 400SC desktop PC, along with my Apple 15" PowerBook and dual G4 and G5 Power Macs) had built-in Gigabit Ethernet NICs, and I was also running a SMC 8-port Gigabit Ethernet switch. So I snagged a 0.6 TByte Buffalo Technologies TeraStation NAS (1 and 1.6 TByte variants are also available).

Inside, you'll find a 266 MHz Freescale MPC8241 PowerPC processor running the show, along with 128 MBytes of DRAM, a Realtek Gigabit Ethernet controller and a NEC USB2.0 controller (at least so says the Tom's Networking review; I haven't torn mine apart. Here's another excellent review, from Network World magazine). USB? Yes, the TeraStation offers four USB2 ports, which you can use to tether external drives (for backup or sharing) or for single-printer serving. Oh....and the drives. There are four 160 GByte PATA-100 HDDs inside the 0.6 GByte TeraStation, with 7200 RPM rotational speeds but only 2 MByte buffers (presumably to reduce system cost, versus 8 or 16 MByte buffer-inclusive alternatives).

The TeraStation is whisper-quiet (much quieter than the Broadcom NASoC-based NAS I fired up a few months ago, although keep in mind that it was a proof-of-concept reference design, not a production system). It's configurable via a web browser (and supposedly also via OpenSSH and telnet if you hack its firmware), and accessible over AppleTalk, FTP and SMB protocols. That Star Trek blurb in the title of the blog post? It references the TeraStation's sleek appearance (particularly the entertaining front panel light show that kicks off whenever the TeraStation is being network-accessed or is checking or rebuilding the RAID 5 image), which would be perfectly at-home on the Starship Enterprise's bridge. I've discovered only a few hiccups so far. Due to a firmware bug (which the factory promises it'll fix any day now), anonymous FPT doesn't work outside the LAN. And I can't harness the email status message feature because the TeraStation doesn't work with SMTP servers on non-standard ports, or those that require authentication. Again, Buffalo promises fixes for these shortcomings.

Continued with 'Stress Reduction Redux'....