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RAID for Zero-G?

Posted by Cliff on from the betcha-space-ghost-has-a-beowulf-cluster-of-these dept.

Cujo asks: "In all seriousness, I need a RAID that supports at least level 3 and stores > 500 GB, and I need to it work in zero-G (but not in a vacuum), and be able to take a fair bit of vibration and noise when turned off. I don't want to spend huge sums: I'm thinking well less than $50,000. I've looked at Apple's XServe/XRaid products, and they look great (about $10,000), but are they rugged enough and who is their competition? Some people make hardened RAIDs for military use, but I'm unfamiliar with the best candidates in that field (and do I really need mil spec?)."

1 of 123 comments (clear)

  1. Suggestions by drsmithy · · Score: 0, Troll
    The best setup for this would be a RAID 10 or a number of RAID 1s (all with three or four disk mirrors). Avoid RAID 5 - it's write performance is (comparitively) dismal (I'm assuming you'd be writing a lot of data) and it's more vulnerable to disk failure.

    Apple's RAID is probably the best off-the-shelf product. Or if you want to DIY try:

    seven or eight three-disk 80G RAID 1s using laptop drives, or

    three or four three-disk 160G RAID 1s using SCSI drives.

    Stripe them if the space has to be contiguous (ie: RAID 10).

    Statistically speaking the less drives the less chance of failure, but laptop drives are rated for higher levels of shock resistance than desktop drives. Laptop drives also have the advantage of being physically smaller and weighing less.

    How well you want to assure data safety is really a matter of personal taste. However, I imagine one extra drive for each mirror costs a lot less than having to do the whole thing again :).

    You'd also want to consider things like radiation hardening for the case. I'm sure the people at NASA could help you with that.

    You'd probably also want something a bit more performance oriented with less redundancy to transfer the data to once it gets back. RAID 5 would probably be tolerable, but again RAID 1 or 10 is preferred. Faster disks would mainly be the advantage here (7200 or 10k RPM IDE drives would most likely give the best bang per buck).