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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
. . . I hear Debian's next distro is going to be on 42 DVDs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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've set up a mirror here, but decreased the quality on the images to hopefully prevent destruction of my site ;)
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!
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.
bah...
One word:
pr0n!!!!
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
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 ($119 from Central Computer). That way eight removable trays fit in my 5-bay 4U rack mount case.
I used a 3ware Escalade 7500-8 RAID card rather than Linux software RAID, but there's no reason why it wouldn't have worked with software RAID. I just couldn't find a "dumb" eight-port ATA-133 card. (And I like the 3ware cards.)
I initially tried to use Serial ATA, using the Promise SATA150-TX4 4-port Serial ATA controller and some Highpoint RocketHead 100 Serial ATA adapters for the drives. The Highpoint web site claims that the RocketHead 100 is not available for sale as a separate product, but lots of retailers including Central Computer seem to have them. The cabling was *much* nicer, but to make the SATA150 work with Linux a binary-only driver was required, so I decided not to use it until there's a driver available in source form.
I thought about using the 3ware Escalade 8500, which is the Serial ATA version of the 7500, but there's quite a price premium, so I decided to stick with parallel ATA for now. Maybe next year I'll set up a bigger RAID using Serial ATA.
Yeah, I can't imagine any possible down side to working in porn.
If that's 3TB of SCSI storage, then it might be note worthy. But it's certainly not a 6 o'clock news event.
Why is this news anyway? I, personally, have built (and sold) several 1TB+ "PCs" over the last few years. 1.8TB can be done with a half dozen drives these days. (for the cost of *2* large SCSI drives, even.) Heh, I could fit that in a 25$ mini-tower case.
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
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.
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?