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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" :)
I am much more interested in what interesting things people do with computers, not how tricked out their computers are.
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.
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
A lot more practical than the maintenance-heat-power-noise nightmare that this dweeb has put together.
I mean, seriously, there goes the environment. Seventeen times as much electrecity, seventeen times as much manufacturing costs, seventeen times as much junk when it breaks down (in one seventeenth the time, most likely). Why don't you save yourself the thousand bucks and just buy a few jugs of motor oil and drain them in a river?
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.
You are doing something massively wrong.
There is no way 90 minutes of 720x480 should take up that kind of space.
An hour in DV format is about 13G
An hour in USB MPEG-2 is about 4G
Even if you use something like HuffYUV it would only be around 30G, something like that.
Have you done a lot of video before? This just doesn't seem right.
Is your source material clean enough that lossless really helps? What kind of software are you using to sample?
Ugh! Don't do RAID0 with 8 drives! With RAID0, losing a single drive means the whole array is all but worthless. (Hard to get data off with one in eight chunks missing...) I think the longevity of a single drive is a normal distribution with a mean at its MTBF. If I remember my statistics, that means the combined MTBF is just the MTBF of a single one divided by eight. Don't divide your reliability by eight!
The RAID5 is a much better solution, since it can handle a single drive failure with no problems. The odds of two drives failing at the same time are really low. So as long as you are prompt about replacing failed drives, you can't go wrong.
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.
Five or ten years ago, it certainly seemed that way and I would have agreed with you. But, the reality is that as storage space has increased and gotten less expensive, the software and file formats have grown to match and consume the space. Programs get more and more bloated everyday because storage and memory are plentiful and cheap so, programmers no longer make an effort to keep their code small. The same holds true for the file formats. 10 years ago, a one page word processing document required 2 to 5K. Today wordprocessing documents regularly go to a couple of hundred K and a few "choice" documents can be over a meg.
Sadly, instead of fitting our entire lives on a massive and inexpensive disk, we will need a terrabyte sized disk just to hold our favorite office suite.
I don't know either since the server is slashdotted, but 3ware makes 8 and 12 channel ATA and SATA RIAD controllers. I highly recommend SATA if you want to put more than 5 or 6 drives in a system, the cabling becomes problematic, and PATA round cables take up too much room on the connector end to use on the tightly spaced headers of a 3ware card. I'd use SATA even if you use PATA drives, just use a converter on the drive side. When SATA drives become more common, you will already be ready.
You could do it with one 550 Watt Power supply up to about 16 drives or so. Drives really don't suck a whole lot of power except on startup. (16 drives pull about 5-7 amps on 12 V on start, then use very little power on 5 or 12 once they are spun up, I've measured)
The problem is the Y connectors. I can tell you from experience, you really want to use as few Y connectors as possible. They suck. Even the good Belkin ones suck when you chain up 10 of them. There are too many places for potential problems.
You will be constantly cursed with weird drive timeouts if you use too many Ys. My eventual solution was to buy some insulation displacement Molex drive connectors and some spools of 18 guage wire, and make my own power bus. No problems since.
Yep, I've got 2 of those as well as 5 other hard drives. Space totals to just over 1TB (1030GB). Damn, if I had known this would be slashdot material I'd have submitted it as a story. Oh well, I guess I'll just have to stick to the hardcoreware.net forums.
For that money you can buy a 2U storage unit with 12x250GB drives, each having its own IDE channel, with RAID 0,1,3 and 5 tolerance which presents itself as a single large Ultra160 hdd.. You can chain them together which either a raid controller, a storage controller or software. Much better and with three years warranty...
avantedigital.co.uk
But, on the geek factor... nice. :)
Now the real question... what's all the disk space for?
Flamebait... ext2 handles files over 2GB (and 4GB) just fine, I'm doing it right now. Your program just needs to be able to support large files.
Exploitation based on money/sex/power relationships
and exploitation of the image/profits the owner makes off of it relative to the exploited's compensation/etc.
there is no thing
what else could you want?