[rescue] Various machines for sale

[Joshua Boyd]

On 1/8/25 22:29, Lionel Peterson via rescue wrote:
> SCSI scanners were all the rage in early Mac era as I recall - they used big "centronics" style printer cables.
>
> Weren't early sun laser printers SCSI?
>
> NVMe has a much, much greater speed than anything you can hang off a SAS/SCSI connector - PCIe Gen 5, 4 channel devices are on sale at Microcenter today...


Yes, NVMe is faster than SAS.  If you are looking for 2 drives of local 
storage, then go for NVMe.  I put NVMe in most of my desktops, as well 
as in my VM server for booting and fastest level of storage.

Now, what follows are my thoughts on a topic that I haven't spent the 
dollars to try out yet.

On a storage server, you will quickly run into trouble with not having 
enough PCIe lanes for all the storage you want. You could get PCIe 
switches from a company like Liquid, but that will be very expensive.  
You could get an AMD Epyc motherboard.  That will be very expensive, but 
that will only let you use something like 20 drives. It won't leave you 
many lanes for networking though.

What sort of network bandwidth do you want to be able to serve? Lets say 
it is 200 Gb Ethernet.  An LSI 9300 will have 8x or 16x 12 Gb/s, so you 
have 1 or 2 cards provide 192 Gb/s of SAS bandwidth.  That is fairly 
close to 200 Gb Ethernet speed, and I think the overhead in SAS is 
probably lower than Ethernet  Build a file server with 24 bays of SAS 
storage and you can now semi affordably attach more drives to the system 
than you could with NVMe.  Need more space?  Add a pair of 12gb/s SAS 
shelves (I say a pair because it looks like most shelves might only do 8 
SAS lanes).

In my own case, I am thinking 100Gb Ethernet and an LSI 9300 for both 
SAS flash and SAS HDDs.  I'm thinking 3.84TB SSDs, and 18-22TB HDDs. In 
my dream, the 100Gb port would run to switch with 2x 100GB ports and 
between 8 and 24 25Gb ports. I would then run 25gb fiber from the 
basement to 2nd floor office, for the computers there.

These aren't terribly priced items currently.  I don't know that I'll be 
able to accomplish it this year. It is a few entries down my upgrade 
list. I also am not certain that I want both flash and HDD in the same 
storage.  I might go two storage servers instead.