Backblaze Storage Pod Project - Price list

Let’s start this off with a list of items, prices, and the vendor where I got them from. I don’t like dealing with a lot of vendors so I tried to consolidate as much as I could to one vendor, and for most of the items I’d like to thank Jason from Zones on getting all these items price matched for me and for special ordering some for me.

I’d also like to thank Tim Nufire at Backblaze for blogging on the Backblaze storage pod, and putting up a parts list of his own at http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/10/07/backblaze-storage-pod-vendors-tips-and-tricks/

I’ll start off with the basic parts list, and then go over a few enhancements I wanted to add. Please keep in mind that I haven’t tested out these items so I don’t know whether it’ll work or not. Stick around, we’ll find out together…

The above items are the exact same parts that the Backblaze blogged about. I wanted to enhance a few things on my system, but I also wanted to make sure in case some of my items didn’t work out all that well that I would be able to go back and build the exact same storage pod Backblaze had. Here’s the enhancements I have in mind (again… nothing has been tested yet:)

1) Dual redundant power supplies

a. Don Honabach from Extreme Media Servers proved he can power up the entire system with one 1250W PSU, so my next thought is why not have two 1250W PSUs be redundant?

i. http://extrememediaservers.blogspot.com/2009/10/wiring-up-pms-for-power.html

b. Parralleling power supply outputs for redundancy… seems easy enough, just need to find a good electrical engineer to help me out…

i. http://www.electronicstalk.com/news/acw/acw113.html

ii. The only problem is the 3.3V leads which may end up going lower than 3.3V once the diodes are put in.

2) Better motherboard

a. I went with the EVGA X58 4-way SLI Classified (I actually wanted to go with the dual processor mobo they just came out with, but that would have been a little over my budget.)

b. I wonder how the onboard SATA ports would perform with the multipliers?

3) Better OS Hard Drives

a. I went with 3 Intel SSD drives instead of the PATA drive

4) Better RAID support

a. From my understanding Backblaze went with a software RAID (I’m not a Linux guy at all, but Backblaze spoke about a mdadm utility which seems like software to me.)

b. I went ahead and purchased a 3ware 9650SE-16ML SATA RAID controller so I can test out how it performs, I also get the flexibility of going RAID 50.

c. BTW, from my initial thoughts I may want to make this a Win2008 machine.

5) Larger Drives

a. Backblaze used the 1.5Tb drives in their blog, but I’m going with the 2Tb ones. Backblaze did test these out before so there’s not much out of the ordinary there.

6) More network adapters

a. A couple of quad port adapters… just in case.

Ok, so there is my parts list. Now on to take some pictures and document this entire project. J