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.
When I wired up 5 60MB SCSI-25 drives back in the day to get a whooping capacity of 5x60MB...
And still that amount of data is almost half of one of today's most popular RO mediums.. =)
But none the less, nice article and with the disk prices these day's it's getting closer within rage for many of the people that spend that much on electronics... I sure do =P
he used fire wire and not usb or scsi - or well anything else. this will save us from the hundred or so "Why not firewire?" posts every time somebody discusses some other method of moving data around.
.
-- It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Neither did he, after the first 30 seconds of being posted!
-- When information is power, privacy is freedom.
/.'ed
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 5, Informative
A few years ago while browsing the Halted Anniversary Sale, I came across a 4 bay 5.25" SCSI drive case for something really cheap (I think $35). I can't pass up a deal like this so I snagged it. Well it sat around for a long time, past the point of me giving up on SCSI. I had replaced my 3 36GB SCSI drives with 2 80GB IDE drives and never wanted to go back. So it sat. While performing the SparcStation ITX hack, I discovered that firewire to IDE bridgeboards could be had in the $50 to $80 range. After using one there I started a little thread in the back of my mind about what other nefarious uses I could find for these little gems. Then one day I saw an ad for a full height 5.25" box that held 3 3.5" hard drives. Suddenly inspiration struck me like a bolt of lightning, and in true Dr. Bob fashion, I took it to an extreme.
The largest drive available at the time I started this hack was the Maxtor 200GB.
What do you think?
Here's how I did it:
1. Start with the empty case.
2. The original case fans were very noisy. In addition to that, the fan grilles cause lots of turbulence noise. So I cut them all out and replaced them with PanaFlow fluid bearing fans and wire grilles. I had to make custom power cable harnesses for these fans as well
3. As long as I was replacing noisy fans, I replaced the fans in the drive carriers with think PanaFlow FDB fans. I threw their grilles out altogether as they operate with their doors closed and the grille is, well, pointless.
4. Next I downloaded the art work for the firewire logo from Apple's web site. I printed out one that would fit and glued it to the boring beige top case. Black indicated material to be removed. First I drilled pilot holes to get the tool bits in. Then I started cutting to remove the big chunks, then I cut closer to the edges with my dremel tool, and finally filed it smooth with my half round bastard (not shown here). Those that know the joke are now snickering.
5. After this the whole case was sanded and painted with Krylon Fusion Burgundy Red. This paint takes 7 days to fully polymerize so I set it aside and focused on the electronics. I also bought a hunk of clear acrylic from TAP plastics and a 30mm round for the center of the logo.
6. OK I've got a firewire hub that mounts in the same hole as the old Centronics connector did (firewire depot), and 3 dual drive FireWire to IDE controller cards. Plus I need to supply power and route the cables for data and the LED's. I decided to mount them on the empty panels between the back of the drives and the back panel. First I had to measure the card for the stand off. Never leave home without your trusty calipers.
7. Now the cards can be mounted on my 3/4" standoffs and 4/40 screws. This project would be impossible without round IDE cables. The powered hub is visible in the lower left of the 1st picture.
8. This might look like a chaotic mess to you, but it's actually a carefully choreographed symphony of cable. The truth is, it's the only way it would all fit.
9. This is glue. Strong stuff.
10. When the front was dry, I hit it with some 3M Imperial Hand Glaze. That made it nice and shiny. Mmmmmm Shiny. (droooool)
11. Now it's time to get silly. I installed 2 6" and 2 12" tri-color cold cathode lamps. These will really spice up my life. After messing with EL wire, I have decided that it's not bright enough to be worthwhile for almost any use. CCFL lamps however are bright enough to be seen in any lighting conditions including camera flash. EL wire is only visible in low light. CCFL lamps also last longer.
12. Like EL wire, cold cathodes require a high voltage inverter.
13. Finally I mounted some LED's in the front connected to the busy signal outputs on the firewire controller cards. I may at a later date remove this metal grill to improve the lighting and airflow.
All done. Here are some beauty shots:
Please visit my archive of art work photos for this project. Click on any picture for a very high resolution photo. Some of these really move me.
Tech Specs:
Firewire 400 (sustained transfer rate of 35MB/s, max for firewire 400)
Oxford 911 chipsets
6 Maxtor 200 gig ATA 133 hard drives
4 cold cathode lamps with a combined output of 12 watts
16 LED's
Powered firewire hub
Click on any picture for a very high resolution photo. Some of these really move me.
*snif...*... Getting a little verklempt...:)
--
Wah!
isn't there a question out there on this??
by
peragrin
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
hey guys isn't this an article already here. or maybe he should of waited an hour????
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/09/23/20 41246&mode=thread&tid=137&tid=188&tid= 198
-- i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
What good will that do you?
by
psoriac
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Tell me, Mr. Anderson, what good is a 1.2TB firewire drive if you can't serve any content from it?
-- I browse Slashdot at +3, Funny
Re:What good will that do you?
by
McAddress
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Lets see, at 700 MB each, that works out to about 1700 movies. Plus about 3,000 songs. Sounds good enough for me.
Forgive my hardware ignorance but...
by
Kethinov
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
if you use firewire controllers to give you one giant 1.2TB firewire drive, doesn't that essentially make 6 hard drives pretend to be one? (AKA the OS doesn't realize it's many) And if just ONE of those drives failed, aren't you shit out of luck with your data?
Again, forgive my hardware ignorance if I'm way off.
-- You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
Re:Forgive my hardware ignorance but...
by
kasperd
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Doesn't sound like ignorance to me. If the six 200 GB drives make up a 1.2TB logical drive, there cannot be any redundancy. Six IDE drives, and no redundancy - I don't hope he have any important data there. Had he at least used RAID-4 or RAID-5 giving him a 1TB logical drive and one redundant disk, he would have a fair chance of keeping his data (assuming the broken disk gets replaced before the next fails).
Re:Forgive my hardware ignorance but...
by
JimRay
·
· Score: 4, Informative
It's a little confusing, especially if you're not on an OS X box, but this guy has built a software RAID setup. Essentially, all six disks are acting as one because he's used the OS X Disk Utility to set them up as one.
The problem with this is that OS X's Disk Utility doesn't support RAID 5 in software, at least not out of the box. So, you either have to stripe the six disks (lots of space, no redundancy) or mirror them (as much space as your smallest drive, full redundancy) . It looks like he went for the striping option, which is how he got over a terabyte. However, as it's been pointed out several times already, this is a bad idea because if one of those disks fails, his data is lost. And I seriously doubt he's backing this "disk" up...
What he should do (and quite possibly is doing for all I know, it's not detailed) is use something like Raid Toolkit to create a RAID 5 setup. Since RAID 5 uses both data striping and parity, his data is protected even if a disk gets hosed.
However, software-based RAID 5, at least in my understanding, isn't exactly a performance champ, so if he's doing a lot of reading and writing to that drive, he's probably better off getting a real RAID controller. However, this would make a killer media backup box.
The linux based software RAID HOW-TO is actually pretty informative for a general understanding of software RAID.
Cheers
-- My other computer is your Windows box
Re:Forgive my hardware ignorance but...
by
afidel
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Wrong calculations, that's for a 3 drive RAID-5, for a 6 drive array it's 5/6ths or 1TB in this case. In general it is (N-1)*capacity.
-- There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Re:Forgive my hardware ignorance but...
by
Darth+Hubris
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
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... the drink... and the luck... ran out
Wouldn't it make more sense to build a SATA RAID array? Using the 3Ware 8 channel SATA controller and a bunch of big ass Maxtor SATA drives you can get more storage for probably less cost and complication.
Re:Slashdotted again...
by
green+pizza
·
· Score: 4, Funny
So you've got a terrabyte of data, but can it handle Slashdot?
1.2 TB RAID -- $900 386-based Web Server -- $0.25 The satisfaction of a slashdotting -- priceless
Re:Slashdotted again...
by
Tackhead
·
· Score: 2, Funny
> > 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.
Hell, the guy could have had an OC-48, we're talking about a Slashdotting, even Firewire's gonna be a bottleneck. (Those poor, poor, poor drives. He should give them to me.)
It would be cool if the OS saw it as 1 huge 1.2GB drive, but that would be a hell of a hack to make it display as unified piece of media.
I would imagine he has the drives striped in software to appear as one large drive. This is pretty easy to do with Windows, OS X, and pretty much any semi-modern un*x.
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.
Re:Only one thing wrong...
by
EinarH
·
· Score: 2, Informative
1/2 gigabyte per second?
I'm not aware of any IDE RAID controller that can do that, but I could be wrong.
The 3ware Escalade 7500 series is some of the best IDE RAID controllers out there and they do burst at max 190MB/s streaming (RAID 5) in read and max 70 MB/s sustained.
--
Melius mori in libertate quam vivere in servitute.
6 drives, no redundancy.. Stupid.
by
Ferrule
·
· 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.
What is this tear-uh-bite that you speak of? I've never heard of such a thing. Please tell us how big this drive is in units of Libraries of Congress or in terms of how high a stack of floppies it would take.
-- "People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
Or better, how many Libraries of Congress could those 3.5" floppies fill? Well, lets see.... they would fill a room 40ft x 22ft x 10ft. What that's all? And they could only pave half a mile of road. Quite lame.
However you could stitch together some fine floppy-disk jump-suits for 10 blue whales! Much more impressive.
Re:Slashdotted again...
by
s20451
·
· Score: 5, Funny
It is my purpose in life to get Slashdot to post a link to a station wagon full of DVDs.
Do you think he might be compensating for something, eh? </Shrek voice>
Re:/.'ed but i can imagine...
by
Raffaello
·
· Score: 2, Informative
If you actually read the article, you'll see that he's running Mac OS X, and that the OS sees his box as a single, 1.1 TB, Mac OS Extended volume called "BigHonkingDrive." So, no, the "PC" doesn't see it as 6 200 gig firewire drives.
Re:Slashdotted again...
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 2, Funny
So you've got a terrabyte of data, but can it handle Slashdot?
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a site full of nerds with T1 connections...
OS X software RAID / LVM
by
djtack
·
· Score: 2, Informative
While it isn't mentioned in the writeup, the firewire bridges will not make the drives appear as one. The OS will still see 6 different drives. OS X pretty easily supports software RAID and LVM, so he's almost certainly using one of those methods.
And yes, if any one of those drives dies, he's SOL, although as somebody else mentioned a RAID 5 would help this situation.
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).
Re:One 1.2TB drive to the OS, or a bunch of 200GBs
by
jo_ham
·
· Score: 2, Informative
He does in fact, have it striped in OS X.
He had a screenshot of the Finder's 'get info' window for the drive. He named it, aptly enough, "BigHonkingDrive".
Hardly newsworthy
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Fore everyones information, this 'project' is nothing new or special. I will not metion its name, but connected to the better servers of a 'top' P2P application are dozens if not hunreds of people with shares (ie. storage solutions) of comparable and rarely even greater capacity. On some servers, they won't even let you in if you have less than a hundred gigabytes of shared 'infomation'...
2c
I tried this on Linux with some problems.
by
Rolman
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I tried this on Linux and got terrible performance at the first try, I got a 23MB/s RAID-0 when each HDD is capable of 26MB/s by itself (everything according to Bonnie++ and hdparm). I didn't know what to blame, the bus, the cables, the Linux SCSI layer, or the whole IEEE1394 support on Linux. Windows was noticeably faster with up to 28MB/s.
Then I made some more research and it turned out the problem was caused by the sbp2 kernel module. This module had some good fine-tuning parameters (sbp2_max_sectors, sbp2_max_outstanding_cmds and spb2_max_cmds_per_lun) up to 2.4.20, but these got ditched in 2.4.21 in the name of a "better way of handling these parameters". I understand the logic behind this move, but the tweakable granularity should have been kept.
Using 2.4.20, I managed to get better performance by tweaking these parameters, then modified sbp2.c on 2.4.22 to reflect the changes. However, I haven't been able to get the 35MB/s this guy got so easily on MacOS X, I'm currently stuck at 29.22MB/s maximum and it's painfully slow to test all combinations of those variable parameters on the sbp2 module.
I just wish there was some document which could explain more about the relationship between these parameters for people not actually involved on the linux1394 project. The comments on sbp2.c are not helpful beyond this point.
By the way, I'm using two Oxford-based bridges to connect two 8MB cache Matrox HDDs, and I'm using Bonnie++ and hdparm for testing. YMMV but the least I can say is Linux RAID support on Firewire still has a long way to go.
Hmmm.. you'd need some aluminium bar-stock, a small die-casting setup, watchmakers lathe and an ultra-clean glovebox for assembly. And of course sacrificial drives to grab the platters and heads out of. You'd need to redesign the driver board and remember to feed extra power to the motor to counter all the extra mass. And while you're at it, why not cap the whole thing off with a perspex window and internal LEDs.
Be sure to use a journalled fs and LVM
by
Tracy+Reed
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Others have mentioned the necessity of RAID 5 in a setup like this but let me point out that you don't want to fsck 1T of disk. I have had to watch the fsck of 500G of disk back before we had journalled fs and it was terrible. When we started attaching many terabytes of disk to Linux boxes we needed a better solution. So you will want to use a journalled fs. Reiserfs is my favorite. Then you will not want to have to backup/restore when you decide your current partitioning layout was a bad idea or just generally want to shuffle things around so be sure to use LVM also. I use LVM on all of my machines, even desktops, and it has really made life easier. Often you will need more room on/home but notice that/var has a couple gig unused and with LVM you just shrink/var and expand/home all without reboot and you are good to go.
the joke (naughty words)
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Moderator - I'm not a user and I'm not familiar with your policy on naughty words so feel free to edit this post for content.
A religious woman gets a job at the local hardware store. The manager shows her where everything is so she can help customers. Some time later a guy comes in looking for a file. So she takes him to the file section. While there, she picked up a rat tail file and said "How about this nice round file here?" and the customer replies "No I'll take this flat bastard instead." The woman is shocked and runs to the manager. "That man called that file a Bastard!" THe manager explained that the term bastard refers to the type of cut on the file and that it's a perfectly normal thing to say.
A few days later another guy comes in looking for a file. Again she leads him over to the file section, but this time eager to impress, she picks up another file and says "How about this nice half round bastard?" and the guy replies, "No I'll take this little bitty motherf*cker over here."
ba dum bum
Bobby "Never though I'd have to explain that line to 4 million nerds" Kinstle
Re:What about a USB 2.0 Drive tower?
by
Curtman
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Slashdot Mirror
This guy is wishing he hadn't posted 3 megs worth of pictures.
When I wired up 5 60MB SCSI-25 drives back in the day to get a whooping capacity of 5x60MB...
And still that amount of data is almost half of one of today's most popular RO mediums.. =)
But none the less, nice article and with the disk prices these day's it's getting closer within rage for many of the people that spend that much on electronics... I sure do =P
..actually there are quite cheap external boxes for usual hard drives including a firewire plughole. Cheap, finished - it works out of the box.
Ok, why get it easy if it can be done complicated as well..
What brave karma-worthy soul will have the courage to post a mirror?
'Fraid it's only a mozilla grab... clicky. Images are still uploading, but I got them all...
Just dug up an old receipt just recently for a Seagate 20MB hard drive, 1992.
Total: $495.24
he used fire wire and not usb or scsi - or well anything else. this will save us from the hundred or so "Why not firewire?" posts every time somebody discusses some other method of moving data around.
.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
The largest drive available at the time I started this hack was the Maxtor 200GB.
What do you think?
Here's how I did it:
1. Start with the empty case.
2. The original case fans were very noisy. In addition to that, the fan grilles cause lots of turbulence noise. So I cut them all out and replaced them with PanaFlow fluid bearing fans and wire grilles. I had to make custom power cable harnesses for these fans as well
3. As long as I was replacing noisy fans, I replaced the fans in the drive carriers with think PanaFlow FDB fans. I threw their grilles out altogether as they operate with their doors closed and the grille is, well, pointless.
4. Next I downloaded the art work for the firewire logo from Apple's web site. I printed out one that would fit and glued it to the boring beige top case. Black indicated material to be removed. First I drilled pilot holes to get the tool bits in. Then I started cutting to remove the big chunks, then I cut closer to the edges with my dremel tool, and finally filed it smooth with my half round bastard (not shown here). Those that know the joke are now snickering.
5. After this the whole case was sanded and painted with Krylon Fusion Burgundy Red. This paint takes 7 days to fully polymerize so I set it aside and focused on the electronics. I also bought a hunk of clear acrylic from TAP plastics and a 30mm round for the center of the logo.
6. OK I've got a firewire hub that mounts in the same hole as the old Centronics connector did (firewire depot), and 3 dual drive FireWire to IDE controller cards. Plus I need to supply power and route the cables for data and the LED's. I decided to mount them on the empty panels between the back of the drives and the back panel. First I had to measure the card for the stand off. Never leave home without your trusty calipers.
7. Now the cards can be mounted on my 3/4" standoffs and 4/40 screws. This project would be impossible without round IDE cables. The powered hub is visible in the lower left of the 1st picture.
8. This might look like a chaotic mess to you, but it's actually a carefully choreographed symphony of cable. The truth is, it's the only way it would all fit.
9. This is glue. Strong stuff.
10. When the front was dry, I hit it with some 3M Imperial Hand Glaze. That made it nice and shiny. Mmmmmm Shiny. (droooool)
11. Now it's time to get silly. I installed 2 6" and 2 12" tri-color cold cathode lamps. These will really spice up my life. After messing with EL wire, I have decided that it's not bright enough to be worthwhile for almost any use. CCFL lamps however are bright enough to be seen in any lighting conditions including camera flash. EL wire is only visible in low light. CCFL lamps also last longer.
12. Like EL wire, cold cathodes require a high voltage inverter.
13. Finally I mounted some LED's in the front connected to the busy signal outputs on the firewire controller cards. I may at a later date remove this metal grill to improve the lighting and airflow.
All done. Here are some beauty shots:
Please visit my archive of art work photos for this project. Click on any picture for a very high resolution photo. Some of these really move me.
Tech Specs:
Firewire 400 (sustained transfer rate of 35MB/s, max for firewire 400)
Oxford 911 chipsets
6 Maxtor 200 gig ATA 133 hard drives
4 cold cathode lamps with a combined output of 12 watts
16 LED's
Powered firewire hub
hey guys isn't this an article already here. or maybe he should of waited an hour???? http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/09/23/20 41246&mode=thread&tid=137&tid=188&tid= 198
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Tell me, Mr. Anderson, what good is a 1.2TB firewire drive if you can't serve any content from it?
I browse Slashdot at +3, Funny
if you use firewire controllers to give you one giant 1.2TB firewire drive, doesn't that essentially make 6 hard drives pretend to be one? (AKA the OS doesn't realize it's many) And if just ONE of those drives failed, aren't you shit out of luck with your data?
Again, forgive my hardware ignorance if I'm way off.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
Wouldn't it make more sense to build a SATA RAID array? Using the 3Ware 8 channel SATA controller and a bunch of big ass Maxtor SATA drives you can get more storage for probably less cost and complication.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
... 1.2x10^12 bytes or 1.2x1024^4 bytes?
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?
So you've got a terrabyte of data, but can it handle Slashdot?
1.2 TB RAID -- $900
386-based Web Server -- $0.25
The satisfaction of a slashdotting -- priceless
>
> Increasing the amount of data without increasing the bandwidth is not the way to avoid slashdoting.
Hell, the guy could have had an OC-48, we're talking about a Slashdotting, even Firewire's gonna be a bottleneck. (Those poor, poor, poor drives. He should give them to me.)
It would be cool if the OS saw it as 1 huge 1.2GB drive, but that would be a hell of a hack to make it display as unified piece of media.
I would imagine he has the drives striped in software to appear as one large drive. This is pretty easy to do with Windows, OS X, and pretty much any semi-modern un*x.
Here's a guy who striped 5 floppy drives to make a floppy RAID... he's my hero:
http://ohlssonvox.8k.com/fdd_raid.htm
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.
No no no - it's not slashdotted. He's just running Norton Disk Doctor. Check back in November.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
What is this tear-uh-bite that you speak of? I've never heard of such a thing. Please tell us how big this drive is in units of Libraries of Congress or in terms of how high a stack of floppies it would take.
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
It is my purpose in life to get Slashdot to post a link to a station wagon full of DVDs.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/news.htm l
http://www.WinWithRealEstate.com/
Do you think he might be compensating for something, eh?
</Shrek voice>
If you actually read the article, you'll see that he's running Mac OS X, and that the OS sees his box as a single, 1.1 TB, Mac OS Extended volume called "BigHonkingDrive." So, no, the "PC" doesn't see it as 6 200 gig firewire drives.
So you've got a terrabyte of data, but can it handle Slashdot?
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a site full of nerds with T1 connections...
While it isn't mentioned in the writeup, the firewire bridges will not make the drives appear as one. The OS will still see 6 different drives. OS X pretty easily supports software RAID and LVM, so he's almost certainly using one of those methods.
And yes, if any one of those drives dies, he's SOL, although as somebody else mentioned a RAID 5 would help this situation.
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
He does in fact, have it striped in OS X.
He had a screenshot of the Finder's 'get info' window for the drive. He named it, aptly enough, "BigHonkingDrive".
Fore everyones information, this 'project' is nothing new or special. I will not metion its name, but connected to the better servers of a 'top' P2P application are dozens if not hunreds of people with shares (ie. storage solutions) of comparable and rarely even greater capacity.
On some servers, they won't even let you in if you have less than a hundred gigabytes of shared 'infomation'...
2c
I tried this on Linux and got terrible performance at the first try, I got a 23MB/s RAID-0 when each HDD is capable of 26MB/s by itself (everything according to Bonnie++ and hdparm). I didn't know what to blame, the bus, the cables, the Linux SCSI layer, or the whole IEEE1394 support on Linux. Windows was noticeably faster with up to 28MB/s.
Then I made some more research and it turned out the problem was caused by the sbp2 kernel module. This module had some good fine-tuning parameters (sbp2_max_sectors, sbp2_max_outstanding_cmds and spb2_max_cmds_per_lun) up to 2.4.20, but these got ditched in 2.4.21 in the name of a "better way of handling these parameters". I understand the logic behind this move, but the tweakable granularity should have been kept.
Using 2.4.20, I managed to get better performance by tweaking these parameters, then modified sbp2.c on 2.4.22 to reflect the changes. However, I haven't been able to get the 35MB/s this guy got so easily on MacOS X, I'm currently stuck at 29.22MB/s maximum and it's painfully slow to test all combinations of those variable parameters on the sbp2 module.
I just wish there was some document which could explain more about the relationship between these parameters for people not actually involved on the linux1394 project. The comments on sbp2.c are not helpful beyond this point.
By the way, I'm using two Oxford-based bridges to connect two 8MB cache Matrox HDDs, and I'm using Bonnie++ and hdparm for testing. YMMV but the least I can say is Linux RAID support on Firewire still has a long way to go.
- Otaku no naka no otaku, otaking da!!!
Hmmm.. you'd need some aluminium bar-stock, a small die-casting setup, watchmakers lathe and an ultra-clean glovebox for assembly. And of course sacrificial drives to grab the platters and heads out of. You'd need to redesign the driver board and remember to feed extra power to the motor to counter all the extra mass.
And while you're at it, why not cap the whole thing off with a perspex window and internal LEDs.
Others have mentioned the necessity of RAID 5 in a setup like this but let me point out that you don't want to fsck 1T of disk. I have had to watch the fsck of 500G of disk back before we had journalled fs and it was terrible. When we started attaching many terabytes of disk to Linux boxes we needed a better solution. So you will want to use a journalled fs. Reiserfs is my favorite. Then you will not want to have to backup/restore when you decide your current partitioning layout was a bad idea or just generally want to shuffle things around so be sure to use LVM also. I use LVM on all of my machines, even desktops, and it has really made life easier. Often you will need more room on /home but notice that /var has a couple gig unused and with LVM you just shrink /var and expand /home all without reboot and you are good to go.
Moderator - I'm not a user and I'm not familiar with your policy on naughty words so feel free to edit this post for content.
A religious woman gets a job at the local hardware store. The manager shows her where everything is so she can help customers. Some time later a guy comes in looking for a file. So she takes him to the file section. While there, she picked up a rat tail file and said "How about this nice round file here?" and the customer replies "No I'll take this flat bastard instead." The woman is shocked and runs to the manager. "That man called that file a Bastard!" THe manager explained that the term bastard refers to the type of cut on the file and that it's a perfectly normal thing to say.
A few days later another guy comes in looking for a file. Again she leads him over to the file section, but this time eager to impress, she picks up another file and says "How about this nice half round bastard?" and the guy replies, "No I'll take this little bitty motherf*cker over here."
ba dum bum
Bobby "Never though I'd have to explain that line to 4 million nerds" Kinstle
Yep