Hardware reviews and the test-bed

[Lost-Benji]

Hey Patrick, May I suggest that with any articles that you are doing on server grade gear, can we NOT see domestic gear like blasted OCZ SSD's and the likes.

It just comes from seeing reviews that are using consumer gear all the time. I know the forums are aimed at "Home" users but still, consumer OS's, HDD's, SSD's, PSU's and so on.
Please don't get me wrong but as we are hoping to see how the devices work, putting them in the likely environments to be used is the best outcome.


Of course, I am always open to you sending bits my way for testing......


LB.

 

[Patrick]

Working on this. What would you consider an Intel 320 or 510?

One of the really hard things is that these types of things are getting used across spaces. What used to be a distinct line between home and enterprise is now quite blurred.

Look at the hosting market and you will see tons of consumer gear.

 

[Lost-Benji]

I understand the consumer/hosting market argument but when dealing with servers for enterprise serving, server OS's and gear is a little more likely.

As for SSD's,

320's are getting on and I personally skip them. SATA-II and MLC not huge catches either.
ARK | Intel® SSD 320 Series (600GB, 2.5in SATA 3Gb/s, 25nm, MLC)

The 510's are also limited and still MLC. .
ARK | Intel® SSD 510 Series (120GB, 2.5in SATA 6Gb/s, 34nm, MLC)


If I was to use MLC then the Intel 520's would be a go but I use these in Dynamic Mirror to ensure AHCI & TRIM
I have been finding the Samsung Pro series to be good and would appear to have foreground garbage collection rather than background in the Intels.

 

[dba]

I have a different perspective. Over the last decade or so consumer-grade gear has gotten better and better, and is now superior to enterprise-grade gear from not too many years ago - and in some cases just as good as the latest enterprise parts. It has gotten to the point that a careful and clever company can do quite well by deploying specific bits of consumer kit in place of the more expensive enterprise versions.

If you are a billion-dollar company, buying just a handful of any given piece of equipment, then there is little reason to do so, but if you are a smaller company, or if your infrastructure requires hundreds or thousands of something, then it makes sense to shop around. Heck, it wasn't that long ago that the average datacenter geek would never have dreamed of deploying anything x86 "to production".

My perspective is that STH addresses the server needs of some rather advanced home users, saavy small and medium sized businesses, and certain internet-centric startups. For that market, nearly every purchase decision is in the grey-area of low-end enterprise versus high-end consumer gear.

But don't worry: If history is any guide, even the most humble consumer-grade gear, if reviewed here, will be reviewed in the context of its fitness for use in real servers.

Hey Patrick, May I suggest that with any articles that you are doing on server grade gear, can we NOT see domestic gear like blasted OCZ SSD's and the likes...

LB.

 

[Patrick]

Very true indeed. Also I went to a SVForum event yesterday and the theme of consumer hardware/ tech invading the enterprise was presented as a fact in the discussions with the various panel members.

 

[MiniKnight]

A value of this site is finding value. Anyone can spend $30k for a fast box. Using consumer tech in datacenters is here to stay. ARM cpus? x86 cpus? UDIMMs? All examples. The entire xeon e3 line including motherboards are 99.9% the same as consumer parts. GPU on/ off or ECC on/ off and that's consumer to enterprise difference.

The intel 320 is almost the same as the 710 if you do similar overprovisioning.

Value for us is not stec, pliant and others.

 

[Chuckleb]

This is also the realm of the tinkerers. We are the ones who buy gear off eBay and then replace fans to make it quieter for lab use. I don't think that most of us mind exploring what is value out there as MiniKnight says. Some of these experiments make it back up the ladder to my research datacenter world, but even there, we are willing to use things like NAS drives and whatnot that would make true enterprise people cringe. There are other examples of companies like Backblaze and whatnot that use desktop grade drives in an enterprise environment.

Mind you that the original comment from Lost-Benji was related to the articles on the main site, the forum discussions are for the more adventurous folk

 

[Patrick]

This is also the realm of the tinkerers. We are the ones who buy gear off eBay and then replace fans to make it quieter for lab use. I don't think that most of us mind exploring what is value out there as MiniKnight says. Some of these experiments make it back up the ladder to my research datacenter world, but even there, we are willing to use things like NAS drives and whatnot that would make true enterprise people cringe. There are other examples of companies like Backblaze and whatnot that use desktop grade drives in an enterprise environment.

Mind you that the original comment from Lost-Benji was related to the articles on the main site, the forum discussions are for the more adventurous folk

Personally, I would put Blackblaze in the cloud category. In cloud applications, they basically get redundancy through adding more devices not the reliability of one so consumer part economics work out well.