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1.8TB Of Disk Space In A (Semi-)Normal PC

Posted by timothy on from the you-will-do-what-sircam-demands dept.

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" :)

12 of 449 comments (clear)

  1. Man, check out that URL... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    anthrax.ds.pg.gda.pl

    That sounds like one mean perl script. First post?

  2. link already dead by doomdog · · Score: 5, Funny

    Only 5 posts and the link is already dead. Maybe he should have bought 17 NIC cards instead :-)

  3. Slashdotted by semaj · · Score: 5, Funny

    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! :-)

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  4. He'll need the space . . . by dgrgich · · Score: 5, Funny

    . . . I hear Debian's next distro is going to be on 42 DVDs.

  5. Man... by terraformer · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

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  6. Re:Does anyone else find this stuff boring? by Anonymous+Freak · · Score: 5, Informative

    Go into your preferences, and put a check box beside 'hardware'. You'll never see one of these stories again.

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  7. Am I the only person... by darkov · · Score: 5, Funny
    The most juicy part - photos are here.

    ...who was disappointed to not find nearly two terrabytes of pr0n at the other end of the link?

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  8. Large Disk Arrays by JWSmythe · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    With 8 250Gb Maxtor drives, he could have 1.75Tb per array. :) 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.. :)

    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. :)

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  9. Re:Controllers? by Anonymous+Freak · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.])

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  10. Are linux drivers ready? by lavalyn · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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  11. MIRROR HERE: http://crazyserver.150m.com by glowurm · · Score: 5, Informative

    MIRROR HERE: http://crazyserver.150m.com

    Enjoy!

    PS: Sorry for the banner ads, it's a free server.

  12. Hehe... Fear the shell :-) by Jugalator · · Score: 5, Funny

    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. :-)

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