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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
. . . I hear Debian's next distro is going to be on 42 DVDs.
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.
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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.
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!
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.
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-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"
Yeah, I can't imagine any possible down side to working in porn.
No No - it's not actually slashdotted. He's running Norton Disk Doctor. Check back in August, 2007.
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