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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" :)
anthrax.ds.pg.gda.pl
That sounds like one mean perl script. First post?
Only 5 posts and the link is already dead. Maybe he should have bought 17 NIC cards instead :-)
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
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.
. . . I hear Debian's next distro is going to be on 42 DVDs.
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!
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.
No, no, no.
Before it goes into production, he wanted to do a stress test. And what better way to do one of those than to get linked from the front page of Slashdot?
Sigs are like bumper stickers.
For those with any emotional attachment to the guy- "!!! THIS IS NOT MY SERVER !!! " is indicated on the bottom of the page (I must have managed to get it pre- /. effect)... So thankfully his drives won't be causing a smoke effect large enough to fill a stadium...
For what it's worth the only picture I managed to download looks like three great big sticks with a couple of hard-drives on top of each other in between the sticks (look something like a surreal altar to the god of IDE Drives). Not exactly enthralling to me (obviously not got enough of a life).
And the question that really must be asked (Budha may have the answer)- space is as good as it's content... Maybe he could run a server to help the poor sods affect by the /. effect...
The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is its inefficiency (Eugene McCarthy)
LMAO! YES! I recently went to tour Full Sail here in Orlando (*cough* scam *cough) and they were like 'If you look beind you that server has 3 terrabytes of storage" and I said "Umm.. my home computer has 200gigs.. i'm SO not impressed!"
If you have to ask,you'll never no.
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!
here.
Who are you? The new #2 Who is #1? You are #617565. I am not a number, I am a free man! Muhahaha.
Reliable, Great Value Hosting: $7.95/mo 2.4G/120G
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.
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
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..?
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.
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
He had only 16 trustworthy friends through which he could file the 60$ rebate for each drive purchased. As the coupon says, "One per customer per model".
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!
One word:
warez
#!/
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
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?
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?
If he leaves anonymous FTP with write access running it'll take less than a month.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
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.
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.
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
bah...
One word:
pr0n!!!!
Just wondering.
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.
Eh? Who said anything about porn? Maybe this guy wants to mirror linux/BSD isos or other software, docs, other websites, etc. You can never have too many mirrors, after all. Or maybe it's just a fun project. It would be nice if not everyone jumped to the conclusion that this guy is setting this all up for some grand warez site or what have you. At least I hope so, anyway.
I disagree with what you say, but will defend to the death your right to tell such LIES!
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
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.
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
You're all wrong.
A highly available, highly redundant data warehouse for storing customer information, product inventory, supplier status, and outstanding orders in a lightning fast database format with a user-friendly front-end, adding to worker productivity while decreasing maintenance downtime, thereby lowering total cost of ownership and increasing company profit.
Nah, I changed my mind. Porn.
-FF
SQUEAK, the Death of Rats explained.
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"
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 ($119 from Central Computer). That way eight removable trays fit in my 5-bay 4U rack mount case.
I used a 3ware Escalade 7500-8 RAID card rather than Linux software RAID, but there's no reason why it wouldn't have worked with software RAID. I just couldn't find a "dumb" eight-port ATA-133 card. (And I like the 3ware cards.)
I initially tried to use Serial ATA, using the Promise SATA150-TX4 4-port Serial ATA controller and some Highpoint RocketHead 100 Serial ATA adapters for the drives. The Highpoint web site claims that the RocketHead 100 is not available for sale as a separate product, but lots of retailers including Central Computer seem to have them. The cabling was *much* nicer, but to make the SATA150 work with Linux a binary-only driver was required, so I decided not to use it until there's a driver available in source form.
I thought about using the 3ware Escalade 8500, which is the Serial ATA version of the 7500, but there's quite a price premium, so I decided to stick with parallel ATA for now. Maybe next year I'll set up a bigger RAID using Serial ATA.
Yeah, I can't imagine any possible down side to working in porn.
This is pretty easy to do, but this person was lucky he used 100 gig drives. Lots of motherboard IDE controllers won't support more than 137 gigabytes/drive, and neither will older versions of Linux. RH starts supporting the larger drives in 7.3. I think any controller promising 133 mbits/second will also support the large drives. I posted some details at www.nber.org/sys-admin/maxtor-160.html because most of the discussion in mailing lists was questionable.
If that's 3TB of SCSI storage, then it might be note worthy. But it's certainly not a 6 o'clock news event.
Why is this news anyway? I, personally, have built (and sold) several 1TB+ "PCs" over the last few years. 1.8TB can be done with a half dozen drives these days. (for the cost of *2* large SCSI drives, even.) Heh, I could fit that in a 25$ mini-tower case.
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 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.....
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.
No No - it's not actually slashdotted. He's running Norton Disk Doctor. Check back in August, 2007.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
But you have all those spinning drives... They should act as gyros and appose any effort to fall over.
ds.pg.gda.pl
:)
DS = Dom Studencki = dorm
I bet this is going to be dorm divx server
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?
Is it just me or does that dude need a new monitor more than anything else ?
"6EQUJ5"
http://slashdot.org/~psm321/journal
Stupid lameness filter, wouldn't let me post it here.
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]