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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" :)
It will only take a month for a cablemodem connection to fill them up.
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.
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.
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.
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
I can't begin to think how you'd come back up after losing a drive in a concatenated R^HAID. Whoops, no R if it's not redundant eh?
I'm actually quite glad I'm not sitting on 1.8TB of data, and I don't intend to in the near future.
If he does mirror the drives, I wonder if his mobo will be the bottleneck..?
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?
Might be using four RAID arrays plus a boot drive. Or have eighteen IDE controller channels (four per card and two on the motherboard?) with one used for a CD drive. Or built a 16-drive filesystem due to some obscure size limit and then added a hot spare. Hard to tell while the images are unavailable.
I was wanting to know what that is in picture number 5 of your project.
If that's 3TB of SCSI storage, then it might be note worthy. But it's certainly not a 6 o'clock news event.
Why is this news anyway? I, personally, have built (and sold) several 1TB+ "PCs" over the last few years. 1.8TB can be done with a half dozen drives these days. (for the cost of *2* large SCSI drives, even.) Heh, I could fit that in a 25$ mini-tower case.
I built one of these, and it works great!
It's a relay built into a power outlet that lets you control any 120v devices with the power button on your computer.
http://home.bendcable.com/werstlein/
He could plug all the "extra" power supplies into it, and when the main computer power supply gets turned off it would siwtch off all the others. It would also turn them all on when he turns on his main computer.
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.....
I'd imagine, though, that the bulk of women who are tapped for this are already in the market as prostitues (it makes sense -- there are usually established ways for outsiders to find prostitutes, and I would guess the only differences between the two are that the action is being recorded when it's for porn).
This isn't to say that it makes it OK, etc, but if, say, all of them are willing prostitutes (of reasonable age/education, not economically coerced or otherwised forced), that does narrow the scope of the exploitation by a bit.
there is no thing
what else could you want?
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?