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1.8TB Of Disk Space In A (Semi-)Normal PC
zdzichu writes "A friend of mine is building a personal server. He bought 17 of the cheapest IDE drives available and used Linux' LVM to get them together. The result? Almost two terabytes of disk space in regular x86 PC. The
most juicy part - photos are here.
For an operating system, he first tried the enterprise-ready PLD Linux Distribution, later he reinstalled Slackware Linux." Update: 03/01 20:24 GMT by T : I'm sure that should be "drives" and not "drivers" :)
He bought 17 of the cheapest IDE drivers :-)
Technology has come so far that we now have disk space on drivers! Simply amazing.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these! ;)
anthrax.ds.pg.gda.pl
That sounds like one mean perl script. First post?
That makes for a lot of large porn collection. 0_o
R4NT.com - A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
When Microsoft's Terraserver was the talk of the town with its massive map database and accessibility..
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
its amazing how fast something can get slashdotted. No comments were posted, and the server with the photos had a been grinded to a halt.
Where will he find all that pr0n?
Only 5 posts and the link is already dead. Maybe he should have bought 17 NIC cards instead :-)
I wonder if he is hosting the site from his computer. /. effect
The disks wont do much good agains the
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
It will only take a month for a cablemodem connection to fill them up.
wow 6 posts and already slashdotted
Last I checked, drivers were still free. There must be some really good marketing out there. ;)
Insert joke about slashdotting a server with 17 IDE hard drives here
I can almost hear the sound of 17 ide drives grinding to a halt.
A friend of mine is building a personal server.
:-)
I'm not sure I'd use the word friend after this. I hope he's not paying for his bandwidth!
Meep meep
Europe is keeping the robot drivers hushed up, fear of labor unions.
On the other hand, I think it was a typo -- so I fixed / updated.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
for you to post his server's address here. It's already slashdotted... just goes to prove that gobs of disk space won't help your web server's resilience to massive ammounts of requests.
Any slashdot links that say "and the photos are here" or "check out these pics" will not work unless you are the first person to view them. Why are people paying subscriptions for slashdot again? What was the benefit?
Damn, /.'ed already...
Anyone that actually saw the site know how he hooked up all those drives? I'm guessing motherboard IDE, motherboard RAID, and three PCI IDE cards. Wow, talk about IRQ hell.
Some proper news. ATM you're reporting blatently obvious facts from teh computing world. Having someone put 2 PCs in one case, or a lot of storage in one PC is not particularly amazing - drives get bigger, chips get faster... big woo. Maybe Slashdot should be renamed:
MooreDot - Bigger, better, faster, Moore...
. . . I hear Debian's next distro is going to be on 42 DVDs.
..trolls that'll insist we need this in every PC.
:P
;))
*sigh* Time to head them off.
After ripping my entire CD collection to disk, I can't fill up 30 GB, let alone the 120 GB that exists within all of my systems combined.
I don't rip at 128kb/s, either.
Unless you're doing research of sorts, creating a massive database, editting video, or stealing movies - you don't need a single TB. Joe Average doesn't need a TB or more of disk space. Joe Above Average doesn't need a TB or more of disk space.
'sides, IDE drives? The gods help the fool who actually has a TB of info on IDE drives. How do you back things up? (And I hope you do - IDE sucks ass.)
Anyway, from a pure pissing contest point of view, this is still extremely cool, and would probably scare the living crap out of most people. (People seem impressed when I mention my total capacity of 120 GB. Hmm. Damn, I need a TB to make them urinate upon themselves.
Well done.
I am much more interested in what interesting things people do with computers, not how tricked out their computers are.
You can get 8 of these and make 2TB easy. Most computers support 4 anyway, so another controller for 4 more would be no problem. Sure, it'd cost you a bit, but hey, it's 2TB!
Haha, I guess all those extra HD space did help at all.
:)
May be he should spend more on better connection instead
kawai
I'm glad to see he added a few extra power supplies. When I first read 17 drives in one std PC all I could think of were 34 power cable y splitters daisy chained together.
Who are you? The new #2 Who is #1? You are #617565. I am not a number, I am a free man! Muhahaha.
*cough*TopSite*cough*
does he want a cookie? it's not like this is hard...
This sounds really cool, but knowing the way quality has dropped on "consumer" drives, I'd put this in a 1+0. I'd deal with .9 TB for data protection, expessially on 1 year warranty drives.
I know this'll pull out the SCSI bigots, but the only reason SCSI is good these days is cause they're tested for longer times (disk media is better quality).
do you use so many atx power supplies when only one can plug into the motherboard? How do they know when to turn off and whatnot?
You may or may not get what you pay for, but you always pay for what you get. In this case, lots of cheap drives = horrible MTBF, I betcha.
I have 0.75T here at home between two computers, one my workstation (with 2 65gig Ultra2SCSI drives) and the other my server (with 2 100gig IDE drives and 2 200gig IDE drives). When I replace my 100gig drives here soon, I will be at 1.0T.
Using SEVENTEEN drives to get to 1.7T seems a waste. Drives that are 200gig aren't that hard to find now, and bigger ones are no doubt coming.
I'm sure the MPAA is coming over right now... obviously 2TB is a significant effort whose only purpose is to circumvent size limitations, and thus the DMCA!
Is there any reason why one would want to use a prime number of drives (or a power of 2 plus one)? Is this more convenient to implement RAID?
here.
Who are you? The new #2 Who is #1? You are #617565. I am not a number, I am a free man! Muhahaha.
moreover: he may use the RAIDtools2 (md ...) in order to gain on every front (perfs and data-availability)
In closing, I'd just like to say, it will never cease to amaze me what some men will do for their pr0n. Err, I mean, sharing a lot Linux distros in p2p networks? ;)
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
would someone have that much space ? its not like a normal person needs 2 TB for his personal server anyway, guess its just for showing off *shrugs*
Reliable, Great Value Hosting: $7.95/mo 2.4G/120G
I like how he has it sitting right next to the radiator for good cooling!
We've done this before, but usually just go with arrays.. It's easy enough in a regular PC.. My prefered way to do it is, get something like the Promise UltraTrak SX8000, and put 8 200Gb IDE drives in it.. If you do RAID0, that'll give you 1.6Tb.. If you do RAID5, it'll give you 1.4Tb.. Linux sees it as a single SCSI drive. It's a lot cheaper than getting a whole bunch of SCSI drives.
:) Then he could use the same method to append them to each other.. Whoohoo.. Imagine 14 of those arrays chained together, and let Linux append them to each other.. 24TB.. :)
:)
With 8 250Gb Maxtor drives, he could have 1.75Tb per array.
I'm curious. What did he use to allow him to put so many IDE drives in the same machine? Off the top of my head, I believe he can use PCI cards that have 2 IDE controllers on each, allowing 4 drives.. Did he have 4 of those, plus the onboard IDE controllers? The pictures are going really slow to load..
I have a server now, that has 8 120Gb IDE drives, with a Promise internal RAID card, which works ok.. It freaks out under load though, so I don't recommend that. We don't use it for a web server any more. It's just a backup machine now, with 840Gb storage.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
If accumulating 1.8TB on a "consumer-level" PC is feasible, are the Linux LVM code and filesystem drivers ready to take on the 4TB barrier?
In kilobyte blocks, 2^32 blocks only allows for 4TB of data to be referenced. ext2 still has options to set for 1024 byte blocksize, and supports up to 4096 - which would be a 16TB barrier.
Doing the Right Thing should not be preempted by making a buck.
You are the wipe on toilet paper after shit sprays from my ass during a diarrhea outburst.
MIRROR HERE: http://crazyserver.150m.com
Enjoy!
PS: Sorry for the banner ads, it's a free server.
He has 1 normal PC case, 2 homemade stands for the drives, and one more homemade stand for additional power supplies.
The stands with the drives look like they could topple with a moments notice! Why did he put them at the top...?
I think it would be better to mount as many power supplies and drives in 2 additional cases, with the shells removed. Might be a problem with IDE cable length; maybe you could do 2 next to each side the the master computer.
The setup.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
That's a space sta... um, sorry... The extra PSs he shows are not ATX. I haven't seen an ATX PS with a monitor power connector. They are probably AT PSs.
"I am Jack's complete lack of surprise."
Think he might have been better off with half the drives and 3 times the ram. Never have I seen a site get slashdotted so fast.
Have to wonder how cheap 17 100GB drives could be? I think of a relatively cheap 100gb drive as running around $90.00 (US). Which would make it very much on the pricey side for your average user.
Seems like you could just buy a DVD-RW and keep all yer porn on handy little disks, while having enough $$$ left over to go on a major bender, or upgrade the REST of your computer.
Kudos for the sheer weight of it though. (Both literal and figurative.)
Just my 6.32070 Drachmae worth
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Imagine the power goes out. When it goes on again, fsck time ! Weee, here we go for a couple of hours :)
Cheapest IDE drives he could find.. Though the site is /.'d, to get 1.8 TB across 17 drives, we are still talking about 100 GB drives.
I just checked price watch, and the cheapest 100 gb drives they listed was for about $100 after shipping. Perhaps he meant the cheapest 100 GB drives he could find, but this is still at least a $1,700 project.
Seriously...
First.. you have no idea how I may or may not use disk space. When you have such space, you find ways to use it.
IDE drives? Yet more bullshit about "IDE drives sucks". Guess what genius, IDE is just an interface.. it says nothign about the durability of the hardware. Yes, it's true that most manufacturers make scsi drives with better parts, simply due to the target market, but not all.
And what do you think raid is for.
Nice troll though.
...with all those legal Pearl Jam bootlegs.
You can get a hardware IDE RAID controller from 3Ware right now that supports serial ATA (the model 8500) in 4, 8, and 12 channel varieties or parallel ATA in the same capacities (the 7500 series), and install commodity disk drives. The hardest part about this is getting a chassis with sufficient power and cooling capacity to handle all the drives.
It looks like running 12 Western Digital "Drivezilla" 200GB drives ought to give you somewhere around 2.0TB of storage (taking into account the bullshit mathematics of hard drives). At Pricewatch prices, I see about $3,500.00 tied up in the drives and the controller.
Whoopy shit.
The Attitude Adjuster, I hate me, you can too.
100mbit connection from cihost, let's see what type of load testing the slashdot community can provide... www.pchopper.com/mirror/server/
I've set up a mirror here, but decreased the quality on the images to hopefully prevent destruction of my site ;)
This isn't just an article where someone put together a powerful system.
It's where they put together a powerful system...cheaply. Using those little rails looks like an interesting solution. And I'm always interested in ways to get more for less...
May we never see th
temp mirror
I'm sorry Timothy. I think it was Michael I was thinking about.
Yeah you heard me right, Linux sucks. Gonna mod me down? Well then YOU SUCK TOO.
I've said it before and I'll say it again..
Better Dead than Red(hat)
Slacker since 1996...Ok, slacker since 1955 Slackware user since 1996
What's so enterprise ready about PLD linux? I've only seen a few references to it and in my mind enterprise and Linux usually equates to Redhat or SUSE. I know there's others out there but that's the ones that pop up immediately.
This guy is way out there
You are all stupid, illiterate fucking niggers.
I resent being called "fucking". I'm a virgin, dammit.
using LVM is not as bad as you might think.. but it seems kind of silly.
You would be better off using raid5, even if software.
With LVM, I believe you only lose the data off that particular drive if a drive fails.. it's not like striping or mirroring where you actually lose the entire filesystem. LVM is a bunch of filesystems put together by the operating system to look like one.
Perfect thing for his unrivaled porn collection.
I have a simelar system:
/dev/hda1 72G 49G 23G 69% / /dev/vg01/stuff 980G 785G 196G 81% /mnt/stuff
bbn@dark:~$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
The vg01 volume group consist of two raid 5's. One is 8 x 80 GB, the other 4 x 160 GB.
I tried to use 6 promise tx2 controller cards. Each have two ide ports, so that would give me 12 ports in total - one for each disk. However it turns out that linux 2.4.x doesn't support more than 10 IDE controllers. Plus you run out of letters and get to deal with drives named things like hd.
So now I am using only four promise cards, with the 8x80 GB array as primary disks, and the 4x160 GB array as secondary on the first four IDE controllers.
This setup is not stable. I get regularly filesystem corruption if I stress the system. Apparently linux can't deal with the fact that the total transfer rate of 12 modern ultra dma133 disks more than maxes the PCI bus.
Currently I am thinking about changing the raid 5 arrays into just plain volume groups without stripping. This would allow me to lose some of the transfer rate and avoid stressing the pci bus.
Actually I'm thinking of what his power bill is going to be. I guess he'll find out if you really can burn money.
hmmm, 17 of the cheapest IDE drives....
Hope that crisis counselor over at that data recovery place is ready for one heck of a call in about 12 months.
Not that I'm a SCSI fanboy, but if he's buying the cheapest IDE drives I hope he's also planning to invest some money in one of these or something. I'm pretty sure that regardless of what he's putting on there, he'd be disappointed to lose that much data. I mean, imagine the amount of time you would have to invest to collect that much warez and porn.
------
Where are the slash-groupies? I distinctly remember being promised slash-groupies!
what's the use of a computer lacking CD-ROM? It's cool and all, but purposeful? I think not.
I just found it funny in a geeky sort of way how he enters commands at the prompt (last picture on the page) like "ls" in the wrong directory and "cd.." without a space. Then he seem to give up and just run Midnight Commander instead. :-)
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
do you know they are ATX power supplies - they might be AT power supplies.
Anyway it would hardly be rocket science to get an ATX PSU to power up without a motherboard.
Before you answer porn consider how much money this array cost and how much money it would cost to actually *pay* for the xxx dvd's.
Most of the kazaa is crap anyway and transfer rates are terrible. It seems there a few mpg's that people like and the other %95 are wasting space and are terrible. For the few good movies and lots of garbage that you actually pay for with the expensive hard drives, you could save money and not be a criminal by just buying the good dvd's. Sure we all hate the RIAA/MPAA but pornographers have not been assholes as of yet and do not deserve to be ripped off. After all the stigma sucks for pornstars and they at least deserved to be paid for their horrible jobs.
I need to focus on school so I purposely took out the ethernet card( internet addiction) and deleted most of my porn. I have so much space free it is silly. Even when I was on kazaa I had close to 10 gigs free. I use another 20 gig drive for Linux/FreeBSD and that is the only reason why someone would want a large hard drive. Its easier to buy too small ones to make dual boot life easier.
http://saveie6.com/
Am I the only one that can just imagine one of those stacks of drives toppling over, and screwing the whole lot? Even the thought of it makes me wince.
gotta love those creative naming conventions:
...
hda
hdb
hdc
hdd
This post was brought to you by the number 584811 and the characters / and .
If you need a really big file system spanning a lot of drives, use some form of RAID. Using LVM for spanninng volumes is mostly a band-aid, if you have run out of space and desparately need some additional space right now.
TechTV did this in XP last year...
Like 8 IDE drives, 1TB+ on XP.
This isnt news
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/lvm/site 1.8T 33M 1.7T 1% /test
I love it when 17967MB can be considered rounding error. That's more space than I have on my whole computer!
Back in the early '70s, I recall reading a proposal for this multimillion-dollar centralized storage server on the Arpanet. Called The Terabyte Memory Project (as I recall), it was going to be this facilty hooked to the Arpanet for use by anyone needing large amounts of storage (not free- they'd have to pay for using it). It was going to use tape as the storage medium, since the hard drives of the time were the size of washing machines, stored just a few tens of megabytes at most, and were enormously expensive. I remember wondering what people were going to use all that storage for. I look forward to seeing what the hell we're going to be throwing on to our multi-petabyte drives a relatively few years from now. The day's fast coming when we'll be able to record every moment of our entire lives in HDTV-quality on a single drive. I wonder how many people will?
As a professional photographer using high-end digital cameras, I can easily shoot 2GB in a day. I just filled up my 256GB array, and am trying to figure out whether to add a 200GB or 250GB drive to last me to the end of the year.
All of the mirrors show only pictures. There's absolutely no writeup about what kind of drives are used or anything.
/dev/1vm/site 1.8T 33M 1.7T
Does anyone know where the writeup is about how this was done precisely, e.g. with what kind of case, drives, and at what cost... (For example, how does it compare to a super-redundant xraid solution from Apple?)
Thanks.
P.S. I enjoyed the bottom of the last picture:
Filesystem Size Used Avail
After all the stigma sucks for pornstars and they at least deserved to be paid for their horrible jobs
Well, you have to suck to get stigmatized. The real hit on mainstream porn has been amateur porn from overseas. Round up a few starving Belarussian girls pay them what is in their eyes a king's ransom, then take the digicam back to your iMovie-laden iMac and 1,2,3 you are a porn magnate.
If you ever thought Jenna Jameson was getting exploited (which is a tough sell), you haven't seen shit until you see this stuff. Obviously frightened women getting grovel shagged by overweight dudes from Valley Stream who kick 'em back to the cold with 50 bucks and a case of genital warts.
Wait, all you Libertarians, no they have no choice. You gotta keep the lights on somehow. Wait, all you Free Marketeers, go back and actually read Adam Smith. He warns against shit like this, particularly white slavery.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
This makes me remember this post on linux-kernel where Milan Roubal ask for help with breaking the 10 IDE devices "barrier":
(emphasis added)
Belief is the currency of delusion.
... or fsck will be murder!
Linux is not the only free os in town.
Linux's 2.4x vm has had alot of controversy. I heard stories about even Redhats advanced server 7 corrupts regularly if you stress the i/o disk subsystem.
Linux is great but not perfect. Neither is FreeBSD. However FreeBSD's strenght is its TCP/IP stack and its vm and i/o subsysm. Yahoo, ftp.cdrom.com, netcraft.com, samba.org, and even apache.org use FreeBSD because they transfer alot of trafic and use alot of i/o. The only thing FreeBSD is weak in is multiprocessor support. Solaris can handle large loads because it divides the work evenly among all the different processors in the server. For a single processor system FreeBSD can take quite good loads and remain stable. Its just more mature. FreeBSD 5.0 includes nvidia support, java, and better threading. It also comes with a great book.
I am mentioning this because it seems you have invested alot of money into your system and hardware is only one part of a platform. An operating sytem is just as important and a good os that is optimized on what you want to do is essential. FreeBSD was designed to be a server operating system so good volume and raid managment is essential. Also did I mention that the ports rock!
http://saveie6.com/
HighPoint makes a 4-Channel IDE controller that supports RAID 0, 1, 0+1, and JBOD.
Maxtor makes 250GB ATA disks as well.
With 3 controller cards, 6TB (before formatting) is possible. With LVM, you could manage a single volume nearing 3TB in size. Without it, you could have three 2TB volumes, striped, in hardware. Or three 1TB volumes striped and mirrored.
That's a lot of stinkin' space!
Cost? $300 for 3 controllers, about $7000 for drives. Plus, oh, a few power supplies. Figure $8,000, $8500 with a box to hook it up to.
$8500 for 3TB, fault tolerant, is cheap.
-----
For the power supply's, couldn't have just have plugged them into eachother with the one's he was using? Or could he just have used alot of octopus cables? For a setup like this, an XServe seems alot easier and practical though, I don't see anything about his total cost.
From the pictures, it seems like these are all sitting on a 32-bit 33MHz PCI bus, with a maximum throughput of 133MB/s. My drive, which is getting a little old now, can sustain 20MB/s. Assuming that he's using some kind of striping / mirroring, rather than just plain concaternation, and assuming he gets the same throughput per drive I do, he's going to be needing almost 3 times the bandwidth of the PCI bus. A 66MHz or 64-bit PCI implementation would be less of a bottleneck, but I can see everything else on the PCI bus grinding to a halt when he accesses the disk array. Assuming he's using a PCI base network interface, this isn't exactly what you want on a server...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Right on. Now, tell me about the differences in cache flushing procedures in ATA and SCSI and I will be able to tell if you are a troll or the real thing.
You still have some way to go to convince me.
We need more spoilers
Just wondering.
until his cat sees that! Those supports look awful shaky.
this is childs play, when someone get's a 32-bay calPC and a bunch of 200+ drives and some 3ware controllers to top 10TB let me know
You either get it or you don't. If you don't, watch more TechTV :)
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Rap is just nigger shit-poetry anyway. There's no music to it at all, and anybody who think there is needs their hearing checked. All these rap-niggers do is swipe...sorry, sample...music from other artists. Why doesn't the RIAA go after them for that?
Hello,
I'm looking for a way to output various voltages (6, 12, and 24V) using a PCI card. Anyone know if such a card exists? I have seen some that can do 5v output, would I then have to use an external power supply and an external relay to up the voltage?
Thanks!
But on a much smaller scale.
(4) 120Gb Maxtor UDMA/133 drives from the local "megamart" computer store (Best Buy in the NW) for $89/each (after mail-in rebate, of course). Cost (after rebates) $372.00 (Had to pay the state sales tax, sigh, Washington sucks sometimes!)
(1) Promise SX4000, 4-Channel hardware RAID-5 controller that can handle UDMA/133 drives. Cost = $145.00 from you favorite PriceWatch merchant. Free shipping, no tax.
Slap it all together, format, viola - 360Gb of redundant space for a total of $517.00
My big concern was long-term backup - I opted to go with a DVD-R/+R Sony drive. Drive ran $350 at the local office supermart (Plus that d*mn sales tax = $381.10
100 4x capable DVD-R discs were $1.61ea via an online source. 4.7Gb/ea, a total backup capacity of 470Gb. Cost = $161.00, not tax, free shipping.
Drives: $372.00
Controller: $145.00
DVD-R/+R: $381.00 (Could have gone with the cheap one for $199, but wanted the dual-capability)
100 DVD-R discs: $161.00
Total cost = $1059.00
Total capacity = 360Gb (RAID-5)
Backup time = 15m per disc, ~20h for 360Gb (swapping discs sucks, but sure beats paying tape backup prices)
What is the space used for? Try DV video editing sometime and tell me how far you get with a 40Gb drive in your machine.
Nic Rivers: "I'm pleased to meet you. My name's Nic."
Hillary Flammond: "Nic? What does that mean?"
Nic Rivers: "Oh, nothing. My dad thought of it while he was shaving."
(Ok, slightly bastardized...)
-FF
SQUEAK, the Death of Rats explained.
This isn't an argument about which is faster, or which is superior...
only about whether or not ide drives are unreliable.
1800gb / 0,7gb dvdrips = 2571 DVDs
2571 * $20 (at least, here) = $51428
What? Unfair comparison? Well you're comparing with an extreme machine. Maybe kazaa sucks, I don't use it. But at my uni there's no problem getting more movies than you'll ever see, mostly in quality DVD rips by ripgroups in a matter of an hour or less per rip. Not that it makes it right, but if you want me to do a pure financial estimate less moral costs, rips win hands down. That's not a troll or a flame, that's a fact. Even if you factor in the chance of getting caught and fine, it still wins hands down. And no, having a client running in the background of my machine isn't really costing me much time, it's a fire and forget thing, check back later.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
3Ware makes IDE RAID controllers with up to 12 ports. I'm not even sure if they're limited to one drive per channel, or if you can plug two (though that would probably kill the RAID performance).
RMN
~~~
Yesterday my partner in crime at Hammerhead walked in the door carrying 1.6 TB of Maxtor disks. Four IDE disks went into a normal ATX box (ok, we upgraded the power supply and fans) and the other four were external USB disks. The sight of somebody carrying 1.6 TB of disks though was a "Yes, it's 2003" moment.
The more sad thing was that the 800GB raid we built with the first four disks is already 50% full...
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
1.8T's of porn. *druel*
nt
>> Why do you even read slashdot then?
> Who says I read Slashdot?
Your 219 comments and obviously decent karma? If you don't read it, what do you do - listen to it? You're only fooling yourself. Now get out of my office. You disgust me and you're fired.
I know those eastern-European women are hot, but a terrabyte of pics?
AMS DK-035A (ignore the Ultra SCSI reference on that page, the A suffix is for ATA), available for $159 from Central Computer
I just set up an eight drive RAID using one of those, and one 3-drive-in-2-bay version, the DK-023A ($119 from Central Computer). That way eight removable trays fit in my 5-bay 4U rack mount case.
I used a 3ware Escalade 7500-8 RAID card rather than Linux software RAID, but there's no reason why it wouldn't have worked with software RAID. I just couldn't find a "dumb" eight-port ATA-133 card. (And I like the 3ware cards.)
I initially tried to use Serial ATA, using the Promise SATA150-TX4 4-port Serial ATA controller and some Highpoint RocketHead 100 Serial ATA adapters for the drives. The Highpoint web site claims that the RocketHead 100 is not available for sale as a separate product, but lots of retailers including Central Computer seem to have them. The cabling was *much* nicer, but to make the SATA150 work with Linux a binary-only driver was required, so I decided not to use it until there's a driver available in source form.
I thought about using the 3ware Escalade 8500, which is the Serial ATA version of the 7500, but there's quite a price premium, so I decided to stick with parallel ATA for now. Maybe next year I'll set up a bigger RAID using Serial ATA.
Multimedia file server. At about 1.5 gigs for a decent quality DivX rip it adds up pretty quick if you have an extensive library.
Must be one _serious_ porn addiction...
This is pretty easy to do, but this person was lucky he used 100 gig drives. Lots of motherboard IDE controllers won't support more than 137 gigabytes/drive, and neither will older versions of Linux. RH starts supporting the larger drives in 7.3. I think any controller promising 133 mbits/second will also support the large drives. I posted some details at www.nber.org/sys-admin/maxtor-160.html because most of the discussion in mailing lists was questionable.
but I'm betting this guy is single.
That picture of the PC plus two towers sitting on the floor in the bedroom, PC case jammed behind a chest of drawers, the metal "spikes" of the towers sitting on polished floorboards - I'm not seeing a lot of women in this guy's life.
And that's before I noticed the underwear peeking out of the drawer...
Some of the other pics show a significant lack of furniture. Well at least with all these drives spinning, he probably won't need too much in the way of extra heating appliances.
Great, one of those 17 drives goes down and he loses 1.8 TB of data.
Great, now all he has to do is set that up as a share and he'll be able to log onto a direct connect server!
If its just a single volume, as you string more together the probability of failure must/will go up.
:)
After my experiences in the industry there is no way I would create one large volume with hdd.
.
Damn ive become cynical, wonder why
I have 340 GB directly.
I know people with 200 Megabytes
I have 1700X the capacity of the guy with 200 mb
1.8 tb, is only about six times what I have,
1.8tb, is just a little ahead of the pack- that's all
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Yes, but think of the money he'll save on his heating bill :)
The Gobi, you mean?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
And what exactly is that on the radiator?
and I thought I had a problem with porn addiction...
First there's all that fruit all over the room
Then there's that bloody goop in the food processor
Finally there's the Windows box peeking out from behind the dresser!
Come on people do I have to spell it out for you?
Don't you see what's going on?
Oh the humanity!
This
I suppose he needs to brush up on his command line knowledge...
:-))
INVENTORY
- 1 x *nix host
- 4 x PCI dual-channel Ultra160 or 320 adapter
- 8 x racks (42U needed)
- 112 x 3U RAID array w/ Ultra160/320 interface
- 1568 x 320GB maxtor drives
1. one big fat software RAID 0 layered on RAID 0.
500TB of storage. Find more PCI slots or
quad-channel SCSI adapters and make it an
even 1.0PB.
2. each 3U array conf as stripe of RAID 1+0
then exposed as 1 SCSI device.
arrays paired up, across racks.
each array connected to different SCSI channel
on different card.
each array pair software RAID 1+0.
grand software stripe across mirrored arrays.
yields 125TB (mirror to power of 2 cost).
- supports up to 7 drive failures per 3U.
- supports up to 56 3U array failures
- probably could support up to 4 total rack
failures
- support up to 2 SCSI card failures
- support up to 8 SCSI channel failures
- fails when *nix host fails
Cost not including rack/space: $1.2 million
$2.41/GB
$9.66/GB (double RAID-1 layers)
$4.82/GB (single RAID-1 layer)
~$4.00/GB (double RAID-5 layers)
~$6.00/GB (single RAID-1 layer plus RAID-5 layer)
Estimates:
$400 per 320GB drive
$5000 per driveless 3U RAID ARRAY with cartridges
$100K for host, plus SCSI adapters/cables.
I was just at the local computer swapmeet today...and saw 250GB drives for $280 (US).
I have a raid motherboard....so...
2 primary IDE chains x 2 250GB drives
2 raid chains x 2 250GB drives
WOW.... 2TB.....whoopdeedoo...that was hard
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
imagine a beo...
bah, why would you bother...
"Smoking helps you lose weight - one lung at a time" -- A. E. Neumann
Did anyone notice what looks to be panties hanging off of the radiator in the fifth picture? I realize that this is a little off topic, but it always makes me happy to see some female underwear strewn about a hardcore geeks computer room. ;) There may be plenty of other explinations for them, but in my heart... I pray for all of us!
Capitalism Served Fresh Daily
Without wanting to take away from the coolness factor... Wouldn't it be easier to just go and grab your self one of these?
The Apple XServe RAID have almost as many drives, but they also have all the extra stuff that goes with it. I would like to know how he has got it all set up. What happens when one drive goes south?
At least with the XServe RAID, you can set it up with hardware RAID 5.
Yeah, this is off topic.
To me the best looking thing in those pictures is the computer and the drives.
What the hell is that ugly pattern on the wall supposed to be? Is this guy putting this box together at his Grandmother's house?
Yuck.
Hmm...Apple's Fibre Channel Xserve RAID is only $10,999...Only around $300,000 for a petabyte...
ds.pg.gda.pl
:)
DS = Dom Studencki = dorm
I bet this is going to be dorm divx server
I remember there was a company that sold SCSI bus expansion boxes where you could add 28 SCSI drives.
Yeah...I know I should just go look at the source, but I'm lazy. Since Linux names IDE drives hda, hdb, etc., anyone know offhand what it does if you have more than 26? What comes after hdz?
That of the 1.8 terrabytes, he's only using 33M of it? :(.
SCSI ID 0 3ware 3W-6410 disk controller :)
* Array Unit 0 Striped with Parity 64K (RAID 5) 359.99 GB OK
+ Port 0 WDC WD1200JB-75CRA0 120.0GB OK
+ Port 1 WDC WD1200JB-75CRA0 120.0GB OK
+ Port 2 WDC WD1200JB-00CRA1 120.3GB OK
+ Port 3 WDC WD1200JB-75CRA0 120.0GB OK
Next time arround I'll go with the X Raid
It was fun... we would rate them according to how much porn they would store....
My record was ~730 Gig's.... used 80 9 Gig SCSI drives (5 16 drive SSA enclosures). This isn't too bad considering it was almost 3.5 years ago...
It was also fun to hold $20,000 processors in you hand.... they were neat machines.... the top of the line (Blackbirds and Ravens at that time) usually went to some notable places... I remember Amazon.com and the Washington Post as my top 2....
Ever feel like you are driving the getaway car?
With all these drives installed, I wonder what the util bill looks like...
Why use 17 120GB drives, wouldn't it be cheaper to just get 6 320GB drives?
a beowolf cluster of these! :P
Am I the only one who isn't understanding how you can hook up 17 hard drives at the same time??? I have an Abit board that does raid, but I don't know how to hook up more than 8.
btw, I know you can with SCSI, but not IDE.
User logging on... 300 baud... 300 BAUD?!? (Click!) NO CARRIER
Nice photos, but the story of why he needs that much space could be even more interesting. Surely nobody needs that much pr0n. It would be great for a home theater system, or ???
It's interesting to note that hard drives will likely soon be cheaper than video tape. I went to Walmart.com and found video tapes for $0.9 per video tape. That's $0.15 - $0.45 per hour of recording. Hard drives have recently reached the $1.00 per GB level. at VCD quality, that's roughly $0.62 per hour. Divx could probably cut that in half at the same quality. I currently use my computer as a VCR, only I record an entire season of programs at a time so I can watch them uninterrupted. I also have bought several hundred DVD's, but I have no backups, and It's a pain to sort through them and figure out which one to watch, so I rarely watch them. I'd like to rip them to hard drive so I can just come in, turn on my own personal TV station, and watch.
Umm...wot? Samba on ext2: 2GB limit. Samba on XFS: no 2GB limit (and ACLs. Schwing!)
Fuck even dd or cat won't do >2GB on ext2.
Opportunity knocks. Karma hunts you down.
..after hdz you use devfs (eg. /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0)
Opportunity knocks. Karma hunts you down.
Does he really need that much space for storing porn ? Another stupid gay.
I use metal brackets like that to hold my 3 old full-height (3" tall!) 5.25" narrow SCSI drives. I don't have a case with 6 normal drive bays to hold them in, so they have to sit outside the case. Yeah, I know they are old, and I know there is cheaper stuff out, but I got them cheap, and it's a non-trivial extra 27 gigs.
:)
They are damn near indestructable. The things are already like 7 years old. See if this guy can say that about his puny (physically) 1-year-warranty IDE drives
I wonder how he keeps them from collapsing? I don't see any crossbars on that mod. He should build a sort of chimney of out wood with some intake fans at the bottom. That way the drives aren't so exposed.
-- Having a Creationist Museum is like having an Atheist place of worship
Its a very nice project, but at the same time such a shame that after investing so much time and effort, in perhaps under two years time the same capacity will probably be availible in a single internal drive.
Just like in men, bigger is better!
Very nice, but why is he standing it next to a large radiator? Maybe the central heating packed in, and this monster storage array is going to keep him warm?
PCI devices can all share a common interrupt request.
I can see it now...
"Wow I got a great deal off ebay today, someone was selling a batch of Fujitsu drives for 10 dollars plus shipping now I can copy my collection of rare music, videos, games, pictures, software, e-mails, documents, uni assignments and finally get rid of my pesky collection of cdrs."
GOTO Subject
... but the whole approach breaks the "don't ever build a box you can't back up" rule.
That's a lot of data to lose in one fell swoop. Must be a bitch to make backups.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
He bought 17 of the cheapest IDE drives available and used Linux' LVM to get them together. The result? Almost two terabytes of disk space in regular x86 PC.
The combined MTBF is the MTBF of one drive divided by the number of units.
17 Cheap drives....
Look like Fujitsu drives to me... Haven't they had problems recently?
Don't hold out much hope for reliability.
So not exactly useful, but 10/10 for style.
Do you mind, your karma has just run over my dogma.
Is it just me or does that dude need a new monitor more than anything else ?
"6EQUJ5"
It's pretty expensive, and slows the machine down a little bit as you add drives (assuming you actually use many of them at once). So what's the big deal? Terabytes of drive space really shouldn't be a news story in an age of 200GB+ hard drives. The 360's should be out soon as well. Is that a lot of storage? Sure it is; but that doesn't necessarily warrant a news story. If anything, it should be somewhat laughable that someone actually took the time to put 17 drives together and forgot to add a CD-ROM.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Video editing. My 120gig firewire drive just ain't cutting it any more.
somthing tells me rounded IDE cables would save his ass from ribon hell...
also I would have probably used a second case to store the other hard drives with the rack he conjoured up and stuffed them all in there, but that is totally awsome!
I'm thinking of doing somthing simular but with old hard drives that arn't being used around my house. their all different sizes but I was thinking it would make a good multimedia storage hub.
Why is this news?
I'm a 100 gigs shy of that, and I haven't upgraded in over a year, due to lack of funds....
Main system - Three Full Height cases side by side, interconected w/ round cables:
Multiboot - W2K, W98se, Mandrake 9.0 and several other distros
1 450W ATX PS -- 4 450W AT PS
FIC system board w/ raid -- AMD XP 2000+ -- 3 Gigs ram
Nvidia GeForce2 TI200 64M AGP -- 19" NEC 95
10/100 4 port hub/card PCI
Soundblaster PCI 512
main IDE controler:
120G Western Digital (0master) - 120G Western Digital (0slave) - CD-R/W Plextor (1master) - DVD Pioneer (1slave)
Raid controller:
120G Western Digital (0master) - 120G Western Digital (0slave) - 120G Western Digital (1master) - 120G Western Digital (1slave)
Promise IDE Controller #1:
160G Maxtor (0master) - 160G Maxtorl (0slave) - 160G Maxtor (1master) - 160G Maxtor (1slave)
Promise IDE Controller #2:
160G Maxtor (0master) - 160G Maxtor (0slave) - 60G Western Digital (1master) - CD-R/W Plextor (1slave)
Got it all hooked up to a Ferups 2.5KVA UPS ($20 at auction, replaced the original batteries w/ 4 deep cycle RV-Marine batteries)
Also on my little network:
CD server:
W2K/Mandrake dual boot
Asus system board - 500 Mhz AMD - 64Megs ram
Voodoo3 3500TV 16M AGP --- 17" Compaq
10/100 NIC PCI
Main IDE controller:
40G IBM -- 3 Sony 4X 6 disk cd changer
Adaptec SCSI card 1 PCI
7 Pioneer External 4X 6 disk cd changer
Adaptec SCSI card 2 PCI
7 Pioneer External 4X 6 disk cd changer
Adaptec SCSI card 3 PCI
7 Pioneer External 4X 6 disk cd changer
ODD Box:
IBM PS/2 full tower
OS-2!!!
486 50 (NOT a DX2) - 20 Megs ram
PGA graphics MCA - 14" IBM PGA Display
IBM 10 Mbps NIC MCA
IBM IDE controller (proprietary power in ribbon) MCA -- 2 80M IDE Full height (proprietary power in ribbon)
IBM SCSI Card1 MCA - 7 MICROPOLIS 1936 3G Full height
IBM SCSI Card2 MCA - 7 MICROPOLIS 1936 3G Full height
The SCSI Drives are in a box I made from angle iron. They're mounted sideways in two rows of seven, w/ a surplus 750W power supply from a rack mount system.Sounds like a jet engine warming up when I boot it up....
Backup Box:
W2K/Mandrake dual boot
200 Pentium (can't remember the main board) - 32Megs ram
7" Grayscale VGA monitor (from P.O.S. system) - 1M trident VGA ISA
10/100 nic PCI
40G IDE Western Digital
VCR Backup Controller (ISA) 6 gigs on a betamax tape (Still have an Industrial Sony BetaMax VCR & 250 tapes)
30G 8mm tape backup onstream IDE
WYSE 85 Terminal (serial)
Printers:
Houston Instruments DMP 62 Plotter - NEC silentwriter Postscript laser - HP PhotoSmart P1000 - HP Plotter 7470A - HP Plotter 7570 - HP DesignJet XL - HP 660C - Cannon S520 - Epson stylus 740 - Panasonic 1124i
Scanners/digitizers:
Canoscan FB620U - SummaSketch MMII 1201 - Aiptek 8X6 drawing tablet
I don't own ANY $&^$$%#^ windows keyboards! I have two Kensington webracer touch pads, a synaptics touchpad, a logitech wedge & a mouseworks optical (w/grid pad).
This is all for my PERSONAL use - I'm not running any kind of a business with this mess. Yes, I do have a decent collection of warez, pr0n & mp3z -- No, you can't have any!
Ok, a couple of thoughts:
1. The "racks" are interesting in and of themselves -- very minimalistic, easy to disperse heat.
2. The assembly takes 6 power supplies? Wow. Now *that's* a bit of juice.
3. And the whole rig is sitting, from what I can see in the picture, in front of a radiator. Wouldn't that be redundant?
4. Huge amount of heat, huge amount of electricity, and for what? To store 33megs of data in a vast ocean of 1.8T according to the picture at the bottom. This guy is a nerd!
Better applaud quick -- before his home office burns down faster than a Chicago nightclub...
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***
He could've just used 500GB HDD's. Although it wouldn't have been half as fun...
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
* dpkg hands stu a huge glass of vbeer ;)
* Joey takes the beer from stu, you're too young
* Cylord takes the beer from Joey, you're too drunk.
* Cylord gives the beer to muggles.
-- #Debian, celebrating the 5th anniversary
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