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Miniature 5400 and 7200 RPM HDDs Reviewed
PReDiToR writes "At Tom's Hardware I found this favourable review of some remarkable Hard Drives. The article points out that with 40GB units suitable for server or desktop use, life with 2.5" drives could be just around the corner. Heat noise and power consumption are all apparently within acceptable tolerances."
...I just got a WD Raptor 10,000rpm SATA drive witha 5 year warranty (under 100UKP) for my desktop. Try and keep up, people!
I believe that's 5400 rpm...
Hier staat een stukje tekst.
On the other hand, smaller drives are likely to be more durable. Smaller platters means shorter arms, which means less "flapping" if you apply a shock to the drive.
As far as the "abuse" is concerned, I think head crashes are a greater danger than bearings dying.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Ok, here's a positive reply.
Ive started on this very thing myself, using firewire however.
Unfortunatly I started getting all sorts of ideas and tacked them on, and now 'cheapie' is out of the question.
I built a system with 4 firewire buses just for disks.
I also chose not to power the disks from the firewire bus (explained bellow why)
The master plan is to have 6 firewire buses (two groups of three, and they only had dual bus cards, thus why i have 4 ports now.. One is not used yet, and will be used with the 3rd dual fw card i do not yet have)
These three buses connect to firewire hubs.
Then, you connect three disks per hub.
Now is the confusing part.
On bus A, you have 3 disks. These are disk A from 3 different raid-5 groups.
Bus B has 3 disks which are disk B of the same raid-5 groups. and so on for C.
Then you setup a raid 5 group out of just those 3 disks. Which in this case gives me 3 groups, and with the 3rd firewire card (bus 5 and 6) this concept will double.
Then you use LVM to link all of the raid-5 groups together into one big volume.
Reasonings:
If any one firewire bus failed (or was unplugged) only ONE disk from each raid-5 group is offline. Raid-5 can survive this.
I dont use power over firewire because a) the PCs supply can not handle all of that, and b) I now have 3 power supplys, each one chained to the disks in the same order as the firewire buses. This way if a power supply failed, it only takes down one disk per raid-5 group, and again raid can survive that.
Firewire is multi-host (IE you can have more than one host controller on the same bus) so with two computers on the bus, doing heartbeat monitoring over a serial link between them, if a computer failed, the other can pick up the disks on the bus and continue file serving.
Using LVM to link the raid 5 groups together means after i start getting disk failures 4-5 years down the road (well, hopefully that long) and it starts to get hard/expensive to find disks of the size i am currently using, I can move the data off the raid-5 group to unused space, and decomition that group. Then it can be pulled off the bus, and replaced with current newer disks which ideally will be much higher capasity, without replacing ALL the disks in my array (as would be the case with a single raid-5 array of all the disks)
Then you recycle the failing disk, and have two disks spare to use for other machines (IE a mirror to boot a new machine off of, spare single disks, etc)
Some links you may find interesting:
- http://www.fwdepot.com/
Best source of firewire controllers, bridgeboards (firewire -> IDE, firewire -> scsi, usb->ide, enclosures, clamshells you mentioned, etc etc)
- http://evms.sourceforge.net/
EVMS = Enterprise Volume Management System. Linux software that lets you manage raid, lvm, clustering, etc all from a server setup. Comes with cli, curses, and X11 interfaces. Not quite 100% there yet, and still has a couple problems for enterprise use, but almost all of them are related to the 2.4 kernel and promised to be fixed when 2.6 is out/stable (and in the past month very well could have been, i havent been keeping up)
(Please please dont slashdot my poor little file server here!
If anyone would like to mirror, its ok with me. This is a p2 200 and will die if more than a few peope hit it at once)
- http://photo.brokensphere.net/index.cgi?mode=view& album=home/fileserver
(Watch for slashdot injected spaces!)
This is pictures of some of the parts at the start of my project.
Havent added new picts yet, nor had much time to work on it.
These picts show the disks all on one bus and interlinked, which is not good for speed, but I was just testing the EVMS software at the time.
In the end, I plan to make my own case, which may be a sheet of half-inch think wood screwed into a wall, with disks hanging on it as so their tops face out, and a plexigl