Why are local drives better
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OK so this is just a blind question, please don't ask why, just looking for ideas.
To summarize if you had to have a local hard drive attached, what are the benefits you'd expect for that drive?
- The ability to share out the drive is an obvious one.
- The ability to use the share as a backup target is another
What else can you guys come up with?
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It could be used as any other share could be for an ISO repo for a hypervisor of course.
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Speed. Access to local drives is much faster.
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Simplicity. Local drives have fewer things to fail between them and the system using them.
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@scottalanmiller said in Why are local drives better:
Simplicity. Local drives have fewer things to fail between them and the system using them.
Conversely, a simple, single drive is a risk unless a RAID1 is involved, which should be a minimum for any server.
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@Grey While I agree, I agree for different reasoning.
The array protection, isn't something that I think needs to be thought of in the traditional sense. I do agree that the local drive needs to be excluded from anything but secure services. So ransomware etc couldn't mess it up.
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@DustinB3403 said in Why are local drives better:
@Grey While I agree, I agree for different reasoning.
The array protection, isn't something that I think needs to be thought of in the traditional sense. I do agree that the local drive needs to be excluded from anything but secure services. So ransomware etc couldn't mess it up.
Maybe we're thinking on different levels. Are you only talking about DAS or is there something else here?
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@Grey said in Why are local drives better:
@DustinB3403 said in Why are local drives better:
@Grey While I agree, I agree for different reasoning.
The array protection, isn't something that I think needs to be thought of in the traditional sense. I do agree that the local drive needs to be excluded from anything but secure services. So ransomware etc couldn't mess it up.
Maybe we're thinking on different levels. Are you only talking about DAS or is there something else here?
Yea.... haha
sorry for being so vague, just trying to get some ideas. Ignore raid. Its not an item to consider.
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@DustinB3403 said in Why are local drives better:
@Grey said in Why are local drives better:
@DustinB3403 said in Why are local drives better:
@Grey While I agree, I agree for different reasoning.
The array protection, isn't something that I think needs to be thought of in the traditional sense. I do agree that the local drive needs to be excluded from anything but secure services. So ransomware etc couldn't mess it up.
Maybe we're thinking on different levels. Are you only talking about DAS or is there something else here?
Yea.... haha
sorry for being so vague, just trying to get some ideas. Ignore raid. Its not an item to consider.
So, this is a workstation?
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@Grey said in Why are local drives better:
@DustinB3403 said in Why are local drives better:
@Grey said in Why are local drives better:
@DustinB3403 said in Why are local drives better:
@Grey While I agree, I agree for different reasoning.
The array protection, isn't something that I think needs to be thought of in the traditional sense. I do agree that the local drive needs to be excluded from anything but secure services. So ransomware etc couldn't mess it up.
Maybe we're thinking on different levels. Are you only talking about DAS or is there something else here?
Yea.... haha
sorry for being so vague, just trying to get some ideas. Ignore raid. Its not an item to consider.
So, this is a workstation?
It could be workstation, it could also be a server. Just looking for possible use cases of a locally attached disk.
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It could be used as Storage Repo (much like ISCSI) for a hypervisor or any file server.
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@DustinB3403 said in Why are local drives better:
@Grey said in Why are local drives better:
@DustinB3403 said in Why are local drives better:
@Grey said in Why are local drives better:
@DustinB3403 said in Why are local drives better:
@Grey While I agree, I agree for different reasoning.
The array protection, isn't something that I think needs to be thought of in the traditional sense. I do agree that the local drive needs to be excluded from anything but secure services. So ransomware etc couldn't mess it up.
Maybe we're thinking on different levels. Are you only talking about DAS or is there something else here?
Yea.... haha
sorry for being so vague, just trying to get some ideas. Ignore raid. Its not an item to consider.
So, this is a workstation?
It could be workstation, it could also be a server. Just looking for possible use cases of a locally attached disk.
The only reason is for speed, in my world. You could do an SSD DAS (array or not) and it will be faster than any NAS, until you get up to the level of a fiber network SAN that has more transfer speed than the SAS or SATA drives in question, which may max at 3, 6 or 3.2 16 Gbit/s (1969 MB/s). Ergo, a 10GB FCoE SAN that's running OBR10 or Raid6 with a large SSD/RAM cache could transfer larger files faster than DAS using SATA 3 which maxes out at 6GBit. The problem, obviously, is contention so you might never see those max speeds on the SAN in the real world production environment.
I guess it all depends on how you're going to use your DAS, and if it's just a machine with a single drive, that screams workstation (that you don't care about the data or uptime is implied by the lack of an array). If you want to make a faster workstation, get a pair of SSDs and run them in RAID0.
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@DustinB3403 said in Why are local drives better:
It could be used as Storage Repo (much like ISCSI) for a hypervisor or any file server.
This would only make sense if you're doing a single LOGICAL volume which has a physical array.
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I think that the best logic for local drives is this statement....
All drives are local, some are just local to someone else. Being local to you is better than being local to someone else.
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I think the context of the data being used plays a huge role.
Who cares if you have a 6 gb video file on a 9999999999 gbit connected SAN. The user downloading the file won't get it any faster than his LAN connection.... Probably 1gbit max shared with other users, or even worse if on wireless.
However, if you have an sql server 10gbit connected to an ssd SAN, it will make a huge difference in performance and speed up all apps relying on that database.
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@Grey said in Why are local drives better:
ay max at 3, 6 or 3.2 16 Gbit/s (1969 MB/s). Ergo, a 10GB FCoE SAN that's running OBR10 or Raid6 with a large SSD/RAM c
You can literally use local disk for any thing you can use remote disk. So I'm not really sure what you're digging for.
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@Dashrender said in Why are local drives better:
@Grey said in Why are local drives better:
ay max at 3, 6 or 3.2 16 Gbit/s (1969 MB/s). Ergo, a 10GB FCoE SAN that's running OBR10 or Raid6 with a large SSD/RAM c
You can literally use local disk for any thing you can use remote disk. So I'm not really sure what you're digging for.
Transfer rates. A local bus will max at 6, while a SAN on a 10 GB link (or dual 10s, whatever) can go higher as the node can cache in RAM and then write back to the drives that are local to the SAN at the slower, local rate.
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@Grey said in Why are local drives better:
@Dashrender said in Why are local drives better:
@Grey said in Why are local drives better:
ay max at 3, 6 or 3.2 16 Gbit/s (1969 MB/s). Ergo, a 10GB FCoE SAN that's running OBR10 or Raid6 with a large SSD/RAM c
You can literally use local disk for any thing you can use remote disk. So I'm not really sure what you're digging for.
Transfer rates. A local bus will max at 6, while a SAN on a 10 GB link (or dual 10s, whatever) can go higher as the node can cache in RAM and then write back to the drives that are local to the SAN at the slower, local rate.
So, just like the cache on a local controller?
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@travisdh1 said in Why are local drives better:
@Grey said in Why are local drives better:
@Dashrender said in Why are local drives better:
@Grey said in Why are local drives better:
ay max at 3, 6 or 3.2 16 Gbit/s (1969 MB/s). Ergo, a 10GB FCoE SAN that's running OBR10 or Raid6 with a large SSD/RAM c
You can literally use local disk for any thing you can use remote disk. So I'm not really sure what you're digging for.
Transfer rates. A local bus will max at 6, while a SAN on a 10 GB link (or dual 10s, whatever) can go higher as the node can cache in RAM and then write back to the drives that are local to the SAN at the slower, local rate.
So, just like the cache on a local controller?
Does your local controller have a 256gb cache?
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@Grey said in Why are local drives better:
@Dashrender said in Why are local drives better:
@Grey said in Why are local drives better:
ay max at 3, 6 or 3.2 16 Gbit/s (1969 MB/s). Ergo, a 10GB FCoE SAN that's running OBR10 or Raid6 with a large SSD/RAM c
You can literally use local disk for any thing you can use remote disk. So I'm not really sure what you're digging for.
Transfer rates. A local bus will max at 6, while a SAN on a 10 GB link (or dual 10s, whatever) can go higher as the node can cache in RAM and then write back to the drives that are local to the SAN at the slower, local rate.
Local bus can always go faster. Any remote disk always has to traverse the local bus, but with higher latency. Remember that any remote disk is local to itself. So any local limitation applies universally, and all remote limitations are on top of that.