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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" :)
Go into your preferences, and put a check box beside 'hardware'. You'll never see one of these stories again.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
here.
Who are you? The new #2 Who is #1? You are #617565. I am not a number, I am a free man! Muhahaha.
Here it is before slashdotting.
Okay, with PCI, you shouldn't have to deal with IRQs. If they don't work right, just put them in different PCI slots (also be sure to read your motherboard's manual for it's interrupt routing first.)
Second, 3Ware, and a couple other companies, make 12-drive ATA RAID cards. So one of those, plus onboard ATA would reach 16 drives. Or, a second ATA RAID controller would allow an additional 4, 8, or 12 hard drives without resorting to the onboard ATA. For a max of 24 drives without using onboard ATA. (In my personal server, I have 8 10GB drives on an ATA RAID card... They're in dual 0+5, for a whopping 60GB of space, but it's fast, and reliable. Someday I'd love to upgrade them all to Maxtor 300GB drives, but I'd need a new RAID card in the process. [and a large fortune.])
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
MIRROR HERE: http://crazyserver.150m.com
Enjoy!
PS: Sorry for the banner ads, it's a free server.
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.
I don't think it's Linux, bud - my suspicion is that the controllers themselves can't deal with a maxed out PCI bus. They are normally bus-master cards, so it's possible that one is grabbing the PCI bus and holding it for so long that the one of the others is giving up, instantly corrupting your array. Promise likely didn't take into account such setups where there's more than one or two RAID contollers per machine.
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.
I doubt it - you still are tryng to squeeze way too much data through the northbridge chip on your motherboard. You may be able to do something with PCI bus timings, but you stand a very good chance of hosing the whole setup that way. You simply need more motherboard bandwidth if you want to support that much disk space - sorry.
What you need is a dual (or triple) peer PCI bus motherboard, so you an have 2 controllers per northbridge channel. Look into SuperMicro and one of their ServerWorks GC LE based boards.
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
I wonder how much this would cost scsi wise.
Figure a 72G 10K rpm SCSI disk at $500 times 20 + 4 spares = 12000 for the disks. Then figure that a raid controller runs $500 - $2000 and add a large hot plug chassis and you're looking at $15k. However, You now have hardware supported RAID at up to 400MB/s sustained and all of those drives are covered by a 5 year warranty. The 4 spares are just insurance against a supply problem down the road. Of course, you need to buy you disks from different lots (5 per dealer perhaps) to minimize the effects of a bad lot. Yeah, SCSI is expensive, but you get better reliability.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"