Joined: 06 Jan 2014 Posts: 75 Location: United Kingdom
Posted: Fri Jan 24, 2014 20:00 Post subject: Suggestion: ATA-over-Ethernet support
Another feature suggestion for USB + GigE routers: inclusion of AoE support and aoe-tools. This allows exporting a SATA disk over wired Ethernet at block device level, which can be very useful for disk cloning, partitioning, or temporarily plumbing a disk from wherever it can be plugged in at the time to wherever it is needed.
Not a substitute for NAS or CIFS and I don't envisage DD-WRT being used for SAN applications (though it would be possible, I suppose). The sort of use case I have in mind is for providing temporary storage space in block device form. For example, my desktop has no free SATA channels, no USB3, and I want to add a new disk to LVM on it, move the LVM volumes off two or three old disks and onto the new one, then replace the old disks (this is presently true). What I'd like to be able to do is plug the new drive into the router (via USB-to-SATA), export the drive using vbladed (from aoe-tools) and mount the block device on the desktop. That allows me to use the drive for LVM, migrate data from one or more of the existing drives, and then replace them with the new disk once I've freed up a SATA port.
It's also worth mentioning that AoE is fast, light and low-overhead (should offer higher throughput than FTP or samba), so it might also find uses for exporting disk from the router to embedded computers (e.g. Utilite) or to virtual machine environments. Or for importing disk to the router from such devices. Thoughts? _________________ Netgear R7000, build 23655M (kongac)
Fonera 2100 A/B/C, build 21286
Posted: Wed Jan 29, 2014 9:13 Post subject: Re: Suggestion: ATA-over-Ethernet support
magick777 wrote:
Another feature suggestion for USB + GigE routers: inclusion of AoE support and aoe-tools. This allows exporting a SATA disk over wired Ethernet at block device level, which can be very useful for disk cloning, partitioning, or temporarily plumbing a disk from wherever it can be plugged in at the time to wherever it is needed.
Not a substitute for NAS or CIFS and I don't envisage DD-WRT being used for SAN applications (though it would be possible, I suppose). The sort of use case I have in mind is for providing temporary storage space in block device form. For example, my desktop has no free SATA channels, no USB3, and I want to add a new disk to LVM on it, move the LVM volumes off two or three old disks and onto the new one, then replace the old disks (this is presently true). What I'd like to be able to do is plug the new drive into the router (via USB-to-SATA), export the drive using vbladed (from aoe-tools) and mount the block device on the desktop. That allows me to use the drive for LVM, migrate data from one or more of the existing drives, and then replace them with the new disk once I've freed up a SATA port.
It's also worth mentioning that AoE is fast, light and low-overhead (should offer higher throughput than FTP or samba), so it might also find uses for exporting disk from the router to embedded computers (e.g. Utilite) or to virtual machine environments. Or for importing disk to the router from such devices. Thoughts?
As far as I know there is no signed 64Bit Windows driver. Thus the majority of users couldn't even use it. Thus I'd prefer iscsi.
Exporting a usb disk is a bottle neck, as USB makes the whole sling slow.
I don't see a great benefit for most users right now, most users still have a router that is too slow for this kind of stuff. _________________ KONG PB's: http://www.desipro.de/ddwrt/
KONG Info: http://tips.desipro.de/
