Posted by
CmdrTaco
on from the now-thats-a-lotta-pr0n dept.
Delta-9 writes "Here is a writeup on how to combine 6 200GB IDE drives into a small tower and hack together some firewire controllers to give you one giant 1.2TB firewire drive." Very cool project, both technically and aesthetically.
Only one thing wrong...
by
TheSHAD0W
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Firewire is SLOW. You're taking drives capable of bursting 100 or 133 megabytes per second and plugging them into a bus that maxes out at 50, with a practical limit of half that. Also, aren't those little bridges expensive? You might be better off getting a RAID controller and boosting your throughput to 1/2 gigabyte per second or better.
Of course, Firewire is a lot more convenient. But if you want convenience, why not just buy single-drive externals and stack them? I suppose you may have an old case lying around, but I'd personally find a bunch of drives that were easily separable more useful. If I needed to take the data on one with me, I could just unhook it and bring it along.
6 drives, no redundancy.. Stupid.
by
Ferrule
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Ok, so the guy goes to great lengths to build a 6 drive 1.2TB external storage device.
Doesn't menton how the drives become one.. It's not raid-5 as that would be 5X200MB + 1 parity drive. So it's either striped, or the large volume properties were faked.
IMO buying 6 drives and not running RAID 5 is really dumb.
Sure is a purty case though.
Re:Thank God
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
Firewire 400 will go at about 42MB/s; the fastest IDE disks do about 55-60MB/s.
Sure, pay for it
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
I'd be happy to build a much simpler SATA raid with hardware RAID5. If you'd be so kind to send me the money for it, I'd love to build it.
I perform hardware reliability testing for a living, so for all those nay sayers griping about the reduction in reliability I say: I'm well aware of exactly what the impact of MTBF is, and since this array is ONLY intended to serve as a backup for my own systems, and me digital media throughout the house, it's worth the risk. I am fully aware of the consequences of a failure of any single part of the system.
Bobby Kinstle
buying drives for an array
by
MarcoAtWork
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I would hope that this person (and anybody else that is thinking about creating an array) is not going to buy all 6-8 drives at the same time from the same supplier.
More often than not drives built in the same batch tend to fail fairly close to each other, and if more than one fail at the same time you can kiss goodbye to your RAID-5 array (and you were backing up your 1+TB of data, weren't you? after all it takes 'only' about 250 DVDs to do it, doesn't it?)
I think that ideally you'd want to buy your drives over a 6-8 months period from different suppliers for every drive, while it's definitely messier in terms of warranty etc. the additional protection from 3 drives failing at the same time should be worth the hassle...
just my 2c
-- --
the cake is a lie
Re:buying drives for an array
by
pmz
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I think that ideally you'd want to buy your drives over a 6-8 months period from different suppliers for every drive...
I respectfully disagree. For a high-availability array, which would you rather have:
- a set of six matched drives, with the same firmware revision and protocol implementation nuances providing thousands fewer variables when troubleshooting a failing system.
- six randomly purchased drives with who-knows-what and who-knows-how-they-will-interact providing only the possibility of trial-and-error chance resolutions of problems.
I think there's a reason why Sun manages the firmware revision of their harddrives as part of their complete software configuration. Sun even provides patch sets to upgrade drives to fix anomolies that come up.
Yes, there is more than just brand-name behind Sun's high OEM prices (and Sun knows it too...that'll be $600, please).
Slashdot Mirror
So you've got a terrabyte of data, but can it handle Slashdot?
Increasing the amount of data without increasing the bandwidth is not the way to avoid slashdoting.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
Firewire is SLOW. You're taking drives capable of bursting 100 or 133 megabytes per second and plugging them into a bus that maxes out at 50, with a practical limit of half that. Also, aren't those little bridges expensive? You might be better off getting a RAID controller and boosting your throughput to 1/2 gigabyte per second or better.
Of course, Firewire is a lot more convenient. But if you want convenience, why not just buy single-drive externals and stack them? I suppose you may have an old case lying around, but I'd personally find a bunch of drives that were easily separable more useful. If I needed to take the data on one with me, I could just unhook it and bring it along.
Ok, so the guy goes to great lengths to build a 6 drive 1.2TB external storage device.
Doesn't menton how the drives become one.. It's not raid-5 as that would be 5X200MB + 1 parity drive. So it's either striped, or the large volume properties were faked.
IMO buying 6 drives and not running RAID 5 is really dumb.
Sure is a purty case though.
Firewire 400 will go at about 42MB/s; the fastest IDE disks do about 55-60MB/s.
I'd be happy to build a much simpler SATA raid with hardware RAID5. If you'd be so kind to send me the money for it, I'd love to build it.
I perform hardware reliability testing for a living, so for all those nay sayers griping about the reduction in reliability I say: I'm well aware of exactly what the impact of MTBF is, and since this array is ONLY intended to serve as a backup for my own systems, and me digital media throughout the house, it's worth the risk. I am fully aware of the consequences of a failure of any single part of the system.
Bobby Kinstle
I would hope that this person (and anybody else that is thinking about creating an array) is not going to buy all 6-8 drives at the same time from the same supplier.
More often than not drives built in the same batch tend to fail fairly close to each other, and if more than one fail at the same time you can kiss goodbye to your RAID-5 array (and you were backing up your 1+TB of data, weren't you? after all it takes 'only' about 250 DVDs to do it, doesn't it?)
I think that ideally you'd want to buy your drives over a 6-8 months period from different suppliers for every drive, while it's definitely messier in terms of warranty etc. the additional protection from 3 drives failing at the same time should be worth the hassle...
just my 2c
-- the cake is a lie
Shit. The things I absolutely can't lose, that can't be downloaded again(OSes, apps, pix, etc)amount to 16 Mb. Everything else is expendable.
The party's over
Try finding a 200GB scsi drive, especially one that is SCA.
The truth is that right now, Firewire is the cheapest solution for having hotswapable storage over 200GB.
Better yet, why not Fibre Channel? Apple Xserve RAID