The Amazing $5k Terabyte Array

An anonymous reader writes: "Running out of space on your local disk? How about a Terabyte array for only a few thousand dollars. This article at KCGeek.com shows how to put together 1000 Gigs of hard drive space for the cost of a few desktop computers." I could rip my entire anime collection for instant access! Rip all my CDs and still have .9 Terabytes left! Maybe Mirror Usenet! I guess the simple truth is that now that 100 gig drives are a couple hundred bucks, we now have the ability to store anything we reasonably could need (unless you define "Reasonable" as "I need to store DNA Sequences").

Comments

Actually

[IAmATuringMachine!]

Actually a DNA sequence is only about 3GB for a human - you're anime DVDs might take more space, at least until you compress them. Then again, DNA should be fairly trivial to compress highly. Let Z = CA, Y = TG, .....

3Ware Escalade IDE-RAID

[rdl]

I've been using these for a long time (6200 dual-port in hardware-mirror, up to the 8-port cards for large disk configs), and they're very fast and reliable. Cheap, too.

$500 for an 8-port 64-bit RAID controller, looking to the host like a single scsi device per logical volume, seems like the best deal available. Along with a motherboard with sufficient slots for gig-e and these cards (easy to get 4 64-bit slots...maybe you can get more with 3-4 buses), and a 4U rackmount case with 16 drive bays, and you can have 4U of rackmount storage for $5k, too.

I've been using setups like this for clients, as well as for private file storage (divx, mp3, backups, etc.), and know of people using them for USENET news servers (one of the most demanding unix apps for reasonably priced hardware).

It goes without saying you want a journaled file system or softupdates when you have disks this size, and ideally keep them mounted read-only, and divided into smaller partitions, whenever possible. e2fsck on a 300GB partition with hundred of open files is painful.

2TB for $8300

[GigsVT]

Inspired by Slashdot's earlier story that was nearly identical, and with the help of Peter Ashford from ACCS, we built two servers, both with capacities well over a TB, for around $8000 each. They have the capacity to expand to 3TB if need be.

Story here

As far as performance:
(from my memory)
EXT3: About 16MB/Sec block write, 45MB/sec block read
ReiserFS: About 20MB/sec block write, 130MB/Sec block read (that's no typo).
XFS: About 30MB/sec block write, 85MB/sec block read.

It seems that file system plays a large role in performance. The arrays are three RAID5 in hardware using Linux software RAID0 on top of the RAID5 arrays to tie them together.

IDE RAID controllers are 3ware Escalade 7810. Write performance can be greatly increased by using 7850 cards that have more cache.

We stuck with XFS, Reiserfs had a bigfile bug, files created over 2GB would lock up the computer basically. XFS in general seemed much more mature, reiserfs seems more like someone's college thesis project, that they never cleaned up to be production grade.

We experimented with different RAID0 stripe sizes, the hardware RAID5 stripe size is fixed at 64k, there are 7 active disks in each array and one hot spare. Stripe size tweaking seemed to mostly trade off read for write speed, within a certain range of values, with a taper off in performance at either extreme, (down around 8k stripes, or over 1024k stripes)

We eventually went with 1024k stripes. That is what the benchmarks above reflect. The variance in file system performance could very well be due to interactions with stripe size, but there seemed to be common themes (reiser always read fastest no matter what stripe, XFS was always better at writes)

I have been in so many arguments with SCSI zealots on here over this RAID... I wish people would understand what price/performance ratio means. IDE isn't a superior technology, but every now and then, it is the right tool for the job, when price is a goal too.