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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" :)
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
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?
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.
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?