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Building a Budget Storage Server
An anonymous reader noted an article running over at Firingsquad talking about
building a budget storage server. Talks about cooling, power, RAID, expandability, etc. Good overview type article, with practical application.
Article is lame when it comes to the important stuff. Its great he gave us the hardware to do it, but thats not the important part now is it? Software.... something that can do backup's to harddrive and then take backups and archive on tape. we went with tapeware because of price, but we cannot archive a current backup to tape, so that means we have 4 week online and no archive really (bad). Are there any open source solutions? I saw a couple but they look hard to setup and manage. Tapeware gives a powerful interface and makes it easy to backup from multiple machines... plus linux boxes don't need special server license (unless they have a tape drive) where any Windows 2000 Server box needs a server license.
Just yesterday I brought up a server here at work to server as a 1.0 TB-range backup server using 8x200gb WD 8mb cache drives strung off a 3ware escalade controller (raid5, two hot spares). The build process was suprisingly painless (used an athlon-based solution but that's relatively unimportant. you'll want 64bit/64mhz pci slots for things like the 3ware storage card, scsci card to drive a tape drive, etc. the cheapest board I found that could do this was ironically a dual CPU MPX chipset board from gigabyte, sub-$200), with a total cost for a total beast of a machine coming in at about 3400 USD with shipping and such. I'd recommend heartily the 3ware controller cards if you want to try something like this, they're worth every penny of their ~200-300 cost simply for the increased performance and reliability they bring to the table as well as the reduced hassle (the array just shows up as a single huuuuuge scsi drive to linux... always nice when /dev/sda is
reported to contain something like two billion 512 byte sectors ;)). I went with a black aluminum Lian-Li case because it has enough 3.5" drive bays to hold all those drives, comes with lots of fans by default (as well as cooling a bit better than your average plastic / steel case due to the thermal properties of the material), and a monster 550w "vantec stealth" powersupply for reliability and the ability to sustain all the devices in the system. Debian stable installed with zero hassle and now I'm just left with the pain of fighting with backup software. ;) True, I'd trust something from Sun or similar more than this homebrew thing, but this is also a mere fraction of the cost of something from the commercial Unix vendors, so for the same total cost I could have multiple redundant servers... or more ale-and-whores money in the departmental budget. ;)
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
You don't want your complete raid-array failing because to much drives fail because of a common problem in their hardware/firmware.
Also, you don't want drives failing due to unpredictable failures of unmatched drives failing to interoperate.
If there were truly a statistical benefit to mixing drives like you say, I would have thought the analysts and Sun, EMC, and IBM would have adopted this strategy by now. Or have they?
Why is it that Sun's drive model numbers are also specific to a firmware revision? Why are arrays sold with matched drives and why are patches offered to upgrade firmwares to know revisions?
How is it even possible to integration test sets of unmatched drives and have any notion of the long-term MTBF of drives with firmwares who have never met before?
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
"How to build a budget file server without knowing what we're talking about"
3 grand is on a budget? What happened to raising from the grave an old AMD K5-166, throw some big IDE drives and you really got a budge file server.
This is a test. This is a test of the emergency sig system. This has been only a test.
You are right. They are probably unbalanced gaming twits. Ignore them.
Few to no real servers actually need 3D, and 8MB is often judged to be plenty enough if you look at the boards designed for server use.
The only exception is if these people are making their every day system into a server, which may not be advisable for anything.
If you believe the numbers, running a drive in RAID mirror will double the effective MTBF, we have done that by choosing the Maxline series vs a standard consumer IDE hard drive.
(Shakes head and bangs it violently against concrete wall)
MTBF and RAID is about entirely different things. The R in RAID stands for REDUNDANCY. You can have a MTBF approaching infinity and you would still have no redundancy.
Mirroring does NOT just double MTBF. It folds two probability functions. With RAID1 not only have both disks to die for data loss, but both disks have to die at the same time! (Or in fact, during the recovery window.) With a MTBF of 1.2 mio hours and a recovery window of maybe 5 hours, this really makes the difference.
Using non-RAID IDE disks, especially on a server, no matter how small the budget, is just playing russian roulette with your data. With at least 5 chambers loaded. It's wantonly negligent. It's unprofessional. Don't do it.
(As a side node, the MTBF is an utterly useless bit of information. It is determined by e.g. running 10,000 disks for 10 hours, with one disk failing. That is one dead disk in 100,000 hours of operation, so MTBF is 100,000. It's a bit like saying that if one woman can make a child in 9 months, 9 women can make a child in 1 month. Reality just doesn't work like that.)
--- The light at the end of the tunnel is probably a burning truck.
As a side note, engineers *never* use the term "self-destruct" in a technical report. The same goes for "explode" and other synonyms. The correct term is:
"Spontaneously Disassemble"
If your laughing, make note that I am being completely serious. I've seen this term on paper too many times.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
I can actually back you up on this with real world experience.
Just for grins (since my older motherboard supported it), I had a 7200rpm maxtor 30gb. Thought, hmmm, can do raid 0 - and get better performance.
Bought a 7200rpm seagate -- performance dropped through the floor. Why? Well, depending on where the data was, the seagate would have to reposition the head while the maxtor was still reading the same track....
Finally bought a similar maxtor to replace the seagate, and my performance did increase. Not by any amazing amount above the norm, but it wasn't dog slow anymore on reads and writes.
Karnal
Tapes are guaranteed to survive a bumpy truck ride off site, and the time you accidentally drop it. You also don't have to worry about wether your tape will spin up after sitting unused on the shelf for a few years. You get no such guarantees with a hard drive.
If your data is worth anything to you, or you have any interest in archiving, hard drives are a poor choice for backups.