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Terabyte Storage Solutions?
DeMechman asks: "As many on Slashdot may know, storage is one thing which you can never have enough of. Given the current situation with CD/DVD rot (Personally I can attest to a 10% attrition rate) hard drives in a RAID configuration seem to be a better and more economical solution. If you own more than fifty CD/DVDs, it can be a daunting task to find a file. I am wondering if anyone has found a hardware solution that can inexpensively be set up to handle 10 or more 250GB HDDs in a RAID configuration. Primarily, has any case manufacturer tackled this niche market yet?"
I'd say that $2.82/GB, for a well-built, well-designed 14-drive 3U RAID (0, 1, 3, 5, 0+1, 10, 30, 50) hardware cabinet with dual-2Gb/s fibre channel connectivity, dual-100mbit ethernet and serial for monitoring and management, excellent Java setup, management, and montoring software, redundant hot-swappable power supplies and fans, and that works and is qualified for use with Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X, qualifies as "inexpensively". But that's just me.
http://www.apple.com/xserve/raid/
Academic prices for:
1.00TB - $5399
1.75TB - $6749
3.50TB - $9899
It's not RAID, but you could buy a 1-terabyte drive from LaCie.
In soviet russia, You ask not what country do for you, but what you do for country!
Oh wait...
Why buy a specialized solution when the easiest solution is usually in your basement (or under your desk, or stacked up against a wall somewhere)? Grab a few PII/PIII boxes and load them up with drives.
I know LaCie makes some 1 terabyte+ stuff. I think it's been mentioned on /. before.
Apple is one of the cheapest, at 6000$ (with drives)
See page here.
We just use old server cases and fill them with drives, a couple power supplies (some of those drives suck up POWER lemme tell ya) and then throw a NIC in to get to them all. Mind you, there's no RAID that way... we recently started messing with RAID in small ways and I like it, we will eventually start putting RAID controllers into the boxes and mirroring our setups.
There are lots of companys out there that offer raid solutions.
Right off the bat, Apple makes the XServe Raid
http://www.apple.com/xserve/raid/
Ot would work for that purpose rather well.
.. but might be useful: Linksys' NUSL2 box lets you hang two USB hard drives off a little network box, I use it to back up my systems at home.
we have a small RAID array with 500 GB of storage, and i still haven't found a cost effective way to back that sucker up.
Imagine... a thousand old cheap Pentiums with 1 GB hard drives and ethernet cards in a beowulf storage cluster... in Japan!
Try deleting some stuff! It's free!
"I am wondering if anyone has found a hardware solution that can inexpensively be set up to handle 10 or more 250GB HDDs in a RAID configuration." clear out some of the porno...good god, if you need that much storage on a personal setup, and it's not research-type data, you are pathetic.
Slashdot News: As serious as a busted rubber
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http://www.intel.com/support/motherboards/server/c hassis/sc5200/index.htm
Just bought one myself.
You can get em at:
http://www.bellcomputer.com
Let em know G Force Hosting sent ya!
I have a TB here, and rather than raid, I decided to do a nightly "rsync" mirror to a "yesterday" partition.
The two advantages of the nightly rsync over RAID are
- It protects against user-error too. If I make a bad edit, I can always 'diff' against
/yesterday/home/me/...'
- It makes upgrades of both hardware and software easy. Since my live backups are excactly that (live, and tested every day), one machine can be fully upgraded while the other acts as the primary one for a while.
Important data also gets backed up to another large HD in my car and DVDs in a safe occasionally, to protect against a fire or burglars.I have THIS IOMEGA unit deployed, and have not had ONE problem with it. I know you were not looking for a commercial product, but with servers I don't dice it.
_dan
you can "cheaply" buy 3U rack mount cases that hold 15 drives in hotswappable SATA or SCSI cages up front. Combined with a 3ware 9500-12, and leave 3 cages empty(or spare drives just not cabled up), this will give you 2.75 TB in each unit of raid5 storage. If you were really hard up for space, you could use a pair of 9500-8's and this would give you 3.25 TB per unit. Some 4U units hold 16 drives, which gives you the full 3.5TB in 2 x raid5 arrays.
If you just use external USB2 drives you don't have to worry about case size or power supply capacity. (Assuming speed is not an issue)
Has anyone had any success backing up a terrabyte solution on a nightly basis? Thats a whole lotta data.
Victory is gained, not in knowing your opponents next move, but in preempting them.
I have 8 x 160GB Maxtor drives in a RAID5 array. It's fast, relatively inexpensive [Fry's Electronics recently was selling the 160s for $69/ea]
/dev/md2 1.0T 521G 522G 50% /ext
The 160GB drives used to come with a Maxtor [Promise] ATA-133 card. Two of those will support eight drives. Not the most optimal arrangement because of the bus having two drives on each channel, but it doesn't seem to affect performance too much since it is striping the data across all of the drives. I'm assuming it stripes in order, so you'd want to stagger the drives such that 1 & 2, 3 & 4 are not on the same controller.
Output of df -h:
The cost to assemble something like this?
~ $600.00
8 x $70 for the 160GB drives
2 x $20 ATA-133 controllers
The biggest issue is that there is no easy way to back up the array. You could use RAID 6 and have two drives worth of parity info, but it still leaves you vulnerable to a catastrophic hardware (or building) failure.
Anyone have any ideas on how to back up 1TB in a home environment? i.e., not $3000 tape drives & $200 tapes
They make several controlers for raid5ing disks...
Good IDE hardware RAID controllers with Open Source drivers. Appears as a single SCSI drive to Linux. We swear by them.
My God! It's full of Voids!
Could you imagine a beuwolf cluster of these things?!
Sorry, I couldn't help myself...
GeneralKael -- Slacker Extraordinaire
We just added a couple of these at the office. We used a SATA RAID card from LSI Logic (formerly AMI MegaRAID) and on top of the 6-port device added six 200GB Western Digital drives. From that page, a 200GB Maxtor can be had for around $85.00. Add in a 2U case, which is probably the most expensive part at around $300.00, and you have yourself the most expensive components of what you need, subtract the motherboard, processor, and all that jazz (which can be had for another $300.00 or so). Running Linux LVM with Samba-3 and Winbind for full Active Directory integration and authentication on top of an ACL-enabled ext3 filesystem, of course! ;)
If the solution lets you choose the drives, you're probably going to pick desktop IDE drives. If you do that you really want to look at Seagate who will give you a five year warranty. You'll need to check warranty terms if you're buying OEM drives though. When other manufacturers are only willing to offer a 12 month warranty and you're looking at 10 drives... well I'll do the maths, you could be replacing a drive every five weeks! And if the drives wait a year until they start failing you could be looking at an expensive maintenance contract.
I bought a case from http://www.servercase.com/, a 3Ware RAID Controller and 8 200GB IDE drives. I've got 1400GB of usable space in RAID5. It runs Linux with Samba and NFS. I also use it for a MythTV Backend.
Unfortunatly, once you have all this space, you WILL find a way to use it all and need more. I put this system together about 10 months ago, and it's at 85% capacity now. I'm preparing to build a new server with 12 250GB drives, to have just over 4TB between the 2 systems.
Look at some of the systems avaliable on newegg. One of the best I have seen is a motherboard with 8 SATA RAID ports for $250. It comes with an thing that fits into an expansion slot in the case to make 2 of them external. Most cases can handel 6 harddrives. It also had 1 ATA133 ide channel.
Yeah, I signed up for as many free email accounts as I could online, and would just email myself some of my documents and stored it on said email servers.
With all the storage upgrades on free email you'd be surprised how much storage one can get with about 10 email accounts
Hmm, is even DVD's from established brands like Verbatim, TDK, and so on suffering from the dreaded "DVD rot"?
:-/
I'm a bit concerned by this phenomenon and think surprisingly little is said about it, when you consider how common these media area. Has studies been made with comparisons from different brands? I'm not sure a study of unknown brands are very helpful since there could be great differences between different manufacturers, or?
I would never buy a DVD from, say, Princo or other budget brands, and really hope the money I spend on established brands are worth it.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I've found the most times where I've encoutered DVD/CDR rot is because people burn the discs at unreasonably (maximum) high speeds instead of a lower, more stable speed. 48x maximum, sure... but do you drive your car at maximum speed all the time? If you did, I'm sure the thing would rot/fall apart just as fast.
Another factor to consider is handling and storage conditions... Most people abuse the crap out of their discs. CDRs (and DVDRs too I'll bet) also have a finite read lifetime. Though not being written do, a drive laser will fade the dye. The lighter the shade of die, the less of a read lifetime it has. For this reason, I ALWAYS pick dark blue dye CDRs, such as Verbatim. I believe even the CDR FAQ talks about this. The lighter shade (greenish but almost clear) dyes have a read time of about 300 hours per spot on the disc. The darker ones? Somewhere in the thousands. I can be off, but I know this is a factor.
But, of course... the quality of the media. Even if the CDR prices have practically bottomed out and there are only a small handful of different companies making these rebranded CDRs... QUALITY DOES MATTER!! Buying the Free-after-rebate or $9.99 for a 50 pack spindle (worse when the spindle is just a shrinkwrapped stack of discs) is certainly going to have corners cut somewhere... usually in the top coat (has none) or the laquer/hard coat on top of the foil (thin, fractures easily or has none)... CDR/DVDR rot happens also because of oxidation. This is really why you want to get *top* quality CDRs that put multiple protective coats on the top... or in DVDRs where the dye AND foil layers are sealed in between two halves of a disc.
The shittiest discs I used, sure, they all died within 5 years. I still have some discs that I originally burned when I first got my CDR nearly 10 years ago and they all still work fine.
who makes big raid arrays, except maybe Apple, HP, IBM, Sun, and all the usuall server and storage folks.
From FW Depot, and Micronet are now out..
o du cts_id/657i num_raid.htm
http://fwdepot.com/thestore/product_info.php/pr
http://www.micronet.com/products/plat
They take 5 IDE drives, and cost about $1200 for the case, supply your own drives..
Front panel setup, and a lot of internal intelligence.. Seems like a good entry level external solution.
I have two AtaBoy raid systems w/ 3.5 T each. Works very nicely. Comes in Ultra160 LVD/SE and FC flavors. I use one of each.
www.nexsan.com
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What things?
http://www.3ware.com/products/serial_ata.asp/
:p)
and the 3ware escalade 7506-12 @
http://www.3ware.com/products/parallel_ata.asp/
I am personally done 11x250 (need a hotspare
They work quite well, have about 50TB in the field.
www.raidweb.com Bought one of these at my previous employer and we really liked it.
PogoLinux.Com StorageWare
Lian-Li PC V1000 handles 6x3.5 + 5x5.25 so by converting 4 of the 5.25's you'd get your 10x disk storage. The 6 are stored in a seperate area as well which is pretty sweet and will hopefully help the heat situation. I had problems with the PSU for this case tho and had to dremel out a section to make it fit.
I use a Hard Drive Enclosure for backing up files. With IDE HDD's getting less and less expensive, picking one of these versatile enclosures up for less than $50 is a good value. I own a DVD burner but rarely use it for data storage since the enclosure is way more convenient. Now as far as 10 250GB drives in a Raid configuration, how redundant redundant do you need you data to be? Or is it that you're just overly cautious after having your backup DVD's fail? Just curious.
This project is working on backups to large raids using Rsync. I think his test system has 3tb.
Werdna
http://sourceforge.net/projects/rvm/
Promise sells some really cheap.
I've put together 2 systems using the ams electronics CF-481 case. 8 exposed 5.25 bays using 300GB Maxtor SATA drives + a 3ware 8506-8 gets me close to 2TB at raid 5 (each system).
1 29
I think they priced out to about $3500 per server (not including my time $).
You also may want to look into
http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?id=10
1.6TB on a spiffy firewire enclosure. $2200
T3 Storage Array
s s= SunStore&cmdViewProduct_CP&catid=51844
http://store.sun.com/CMTemplate/CEServlet?proce
We use Linux LVM to take snapshots and then do a hot backup of that data to an archive box. That archive box contains removable hard drives (tape drives are just crap), and we then take the pysical drives to an off-site location to provide security and all the goodness that comes with off-site storage. We also use rsync to synchronize our production NAS devices with a parallel NAS device, to which we can hot-cut and have a current copy of all our data to a 15 minute window. Because rsync (with ext3 ACL support, mind you) only copies what has changed on the filesystem, it goes relatively quickly. You can find my rsync packages at ftp://bagel.express.org/ (as well as patched Samba-3 packages that really work with Winbind and some updated kernel packages for LVM+snapshot support) at that FTP site.
http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/prolian tstorage/sharedstorage/sacluster/msa20/
HP MSA20
The HP StorageWorks Modular Smart Array 20 Enclosure (MSA20) is a SATA 1.5 Gb/s disk drive storage enclosure with Ultra320 SCSI host connectivity. These enclosures deliver industry-leading availability, storage density, and upgradeability to meet customers' demanding and growing storage needs. The MSA20 delivers the ideal mix of low-cost and high capacity, for minimum I/O workloads such as reference data, archival, and disk-to-disk backup
I can answer your question, as I've just built one as a giant backup solution for our hosting company.
:)
I went with Serial ATA for a couple reasons:
1) It's cheaper and has more capacity than SCSI;
2) Cabling is not a mess as it is with regular IDE (if you've never seen serial ATA cables, the first thing you will notice is that they are small!);
3) It can hotswap, unlike regular IDE;
4) It's not that much more expensive than regular IDE.
I custom-built a 3U server from InterProMicro. They are a small (local if you are in the Bay Area) SuperMicro reseller that does great work. (If you need something, call and ask for Andy. Tell him Erica from Simpli sent you!)
The machine I specced out was as follows:
* 3U case with 8 hot-swap SATA drive bays;
* 8-port 3Ware 8506-8 SATA RAID controller;
* 5x250GB SATA drives in a RAID-5 array;
* Dual Xeon processors.
The 5 drives give you 1TB of storage, and expanding up to 8 gives you 1.75TB. I would also recommend a separate mirrored SATA 10KRPM array for the OS if you want really fast speeds.
This whole solution (Xeons; 5 drives; 3U case) cost just over $3000... which is pretty reasonable for 1TB of network-accessible storage. Interpro has solutions that go up to 24 SATA drives, which at 250GB each gives you an ungodly amount of space (5.75TB, if my calculations are correct.)
My suggestion is to go with a niche server builder like InterproMicro over Dell or Compaq or any of those guys. You can get the same high quality from a custom manufacturer without paying the steep brand name price from a larger manufacturer. As for the drives, any time the goal is "as much space as possible", SATA should be your first choice.
Good luck!
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
Probably your best bet is to get a full tower case and add some drive bay capacity to it with sheet metal. You'll need to add several new fans, and you will want probably a good 500W of power supply capacity if not more. If you can get drives with a spinup delay which you can specify, then you can probably get away with less. Two or more cheap power supplies should do the job, I bought a couple of 250W power supplies for $7 each a while back, should be easy enough to do that still.
Adding drive capacity is easy, cut out two sheets of sheet metal (or have them cut, but sheet metal shears are plenty inexpensive) the same size and then draw two parallel lines down them at the same width as the distance between the front and back screws of a hard drive, then measure some lines that cross them at a comfortable distance. With a little bit of planning you can bend the sheet metal (the edge of a metal table or railing, a hammer, and a couple of cheap C-clamps can get this done for you, just hammer back and forth along the edge gradually) at the front of the case so you can install some fans. Punch or drill holes for the hard drive (and fan) mounting. If you are drilling, do yourself a favor and clamp it down to a piece of plywood, because if the drill bit catches the sheet metal it will spin it around in circles and you can easily slash open your wrists and bleed out. I am not kidding, this has really happened to people.
A full tower case should have enough room to hold at least ten drives. Slap in a cheap athlon xp, duron, or sempron with GigE, add some cheap IDE PATA cards, and do software raid in linux (or similar.) Hardware raid is expensive and typically no faster than doing software raid on a dedicated system.
This should only cost you about $200 over the cost of the drives. It is not the most robust solution, but it is probably the cheapest. Depending on your client operating systems you will want to set up NFS, Samba, and/or netatalk for Unix, Windows, or Mac clients respectively. (Last I checked MacOS had "issues" connecting to SMB shares with full compatibility, like in 10.2.6 it did not allow perfectly legal characters on files written to SMB shares.) If you want to solidly install the sheet metal into the case, I suggest a pop riveter, which you should be able to get with a sufficient supply of rivets for $20 or less. I know this sounds kind of ghetto but it is definitely the cheapest way to go and is frankly little less robust than buying a completed solution. If you want to be extra classy about it, visit your local scrap yard and pick up some aluminum. However, to cut aluminum properly (it's going to have to be around 1/8" thick to have the rigidity you'd want) you'll need a shear, so the sheet metal is probably the way to go. Turn the edges of the sheet metal on the back side (where the drives slide in and out) out slightly and cover the edges with something.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
For what it's worth, there was a similar inquiry not too long ago.
heat, noise, electricity.... eliminate them, and people will start working on mundane thinks like software config.
LVM is easier to set up then RAID (although it doesn't have the same redundnacy/recovery features as RAID). Think of it as chaining together several disks, throwing out the conventional notion of partioning. It makes it convenient for dealing with large disks, and several of them! And EIDE storage is cheap...
3Ware Escalade -- http://www.3ware.com/
The Escalade 8506-12 has 12 x SATA ports onboard. Full hardware implementation; appears as a SCSI host adapter to the OS. Drivers and management utilities for MS-Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD. It will even email you if you have a disk failure.
3Ware was one of the first ATA RAID vendors to put a driver in the Linux kernel, and it was a fully-supported, GPL driver from day one. Rock solid stuff. Good tech support, too.
Highly recommended.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
I have two servers with 6 each of 200Gb SATA drives. There are 2 drives per Adaptec, RAID capable SATA controller, so three Adaptec controllers total. One server has a RAID 5 of all 6 drives which yields just under 1TB of storage. The other is setup as JBOD and yields just under 1.2Tb of total storage.
More recently I've purchased 500Mb and 1TB LaCie Big Disk and Bigger Disk storage devices. They work extremely well and have almost no latency for their size. I use them for testing things and have been quite impressed. In one scenario I had them connected via firewire 800 controllers to separate 1U servers running RH Linux and Oracle 10G with DRDB sync'ing them as a test cluster scenario. In another case, I had three of the 500Mb ones connected via USB 2 to a Windows 2003 server and a software RAID 5 setup in Windows (Windows can RAID any number of disks of similiar architecture... ie: multiple IDE, multiple SATA, multiple USB, multiple firewire, etc.).
Presently, I have a 1TB LaCie Bigger disk connected via a PCMCIA Firewire 800 card to my laptop and two 500Mb LaCie Big Disks in a s/w RAID 1 connected to my file server and used for disk to disk backup.
As for the 10+ disks you asked about, I haven't tried anything of that size since I haven't found a server case that can take that number of drives with standard power supplies. The most I have is the 6 SATA drives in a tall tower with a 600Watt power supply, but these also need cooling.
Of course, cost usually becomes an issue. The LaCie 1TB Bigger Disk is only $1100.00 if you shop around. The smaller 500MB Big Disk's are closer to $500.00. Compare this to the "buck a gig" pricing for SATA drives and 4 x 250Gb SATA drives will cost you right around $1000.00, but after formatting you get less. Plus, for a RAID, you need another drive, so for approx 1TB you need 5x250GB SATA = $1250.00 plus the case, high end power supply, etc. The LaCie drives end up being more disk for the buck if you don't mind external storage.
It's almost funny... Once you start talking about RAID with more than 2 drives, IDE is at a disadvantage.
I'm not referring to performance, reliability, etc. (although those are serious issues), but about price.
If you have a master & a slave, then you reduce performance... That can be a very serious if you have a RAID configuration. So, if you want to put 7200RPM hard drives together, you start to need a 6 or more channel RAID card (whereas a single channel SCSI RAID card would work fine). And guess what? Decent quality 6+ channel RAID cards are very expensive, perhaps even negating the savings from using IDE drives rather than SCSI in the first place.
Remember, that's based on price-only... I haven't even begun talking about how much worse the performance would be, or reliability issues with using inexpensive IDE drives.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
2 of these controllers: http://www.3ware.com/products/serial_ata9000.asp with this case: http://www.chenbro.com.tw/product/product.jsp?p=3& s=304&pid=62
and you can have SATA 250GB X 24 = 6TB of storage. That or buy a bunch of 9.1GB SCSI drives, and a lot of arrays - and you'll end up with a fairly cheap storage solution, and one heck of a horrible power bill.
There are many manufacturers that make raid cases and rack mounts to hold many hard drives. They are usually meant for companies that want a complete supported solution, though, and not available barebones to hobbyists. They contain everything, including the drives, management software, etc.
You can find RAID cards that will support up to 8 drives, but few that will support more, and often those that support multiple drives cost more than the drives themselves.
Your best bet, I suspect, is to make a dedicated RAID server. Buy a tower case, and mount the hard drives in there - there are brackets that fit three 3.5" drives into a full height 5 1/4" slot, and a full tower should be able to fit 3-4 of these for a total of 9-12 removable drives. Then use your favorite OS that has software RAID and add a gigabyte ethernet card for a direct connection to the computer you will primarily access this array from, and another for a network connection. You'll need to add additional IDE adaptors, but they are inexpensive. I'd shy away from using raid cards or onboard raid, and then raiding the resulting fewer drives in software - too many layers to keep track of. This is not meant for hot swap usage, so plan in extra unused drives so you only have to shut the machine down once a year to replace 1-3 drives.
Be sure to use a beefy power supply, and hard drive holders with fans built in - you need lots of power and lots of cooling, even when the array is idle.
I recommend OpenBSD, mainly because you know that only the things you install yourself are active. If not, then go to freebsd-stable.
-Adam
I've recently been given a similar task in constructing a new fileserver, and when I came across the products available from 3ware I knew I found the answer. Their raid cards are rock-solid, work exceedingly well with linux and come in almost any configuration you could ever ask for. The real kicker is that they're built around supporting inexpensive PATA and SATA hard-drives, rather than high-end SCSI. http://www.3ware.com
Then for a case to put all those drives in, P-link offers a few that do a decent job. The quality of these cases is somewhat mediocre, but the price is hard to argue. Just don't buy swappable drive bays here, as those can be found for half the price anywhere else. http://www.plinkusa.net/web5101.htm
I thought this article was cool. What I would personally rather have here than just a simple RAID in one location(for something like my entire data collection) is the ability to distribute replicas accross a variety of locations--that way I wouldn't loose my collection even if my house burned down or whatever.
Get yourself an old/used hardware RAID off eBay, one that uses LVD SCSI drives, and replace the drives with cheap ATA units, equipped with SCSI-ATA bridges.
SCSI-ATA bridgesOnly trick is it can be a bit challenging to mount the ATA drives in the chassis, depending on how the original drives mounted. Some arrays are nice enough to use complete trays with a separate connector, but often they'll just use basic rails and rely on the drive's SCA connector, which is bad news for this type of adaptaion
Calpc.com 8u rack mount 16 bay case. ~400US Promise SX6000 ~275US 6x Maxtor 200GB drives ~150 ea. and other various intricasies. total system was about 2500
"And the heathens with their ways of trickery and deceit shall not prevail over the will of the righteous"
-What RAID level you want (5 usually requires better hardware)
-Whether you want hardware RAID (I strongly recommend this) or soft RAID
-How much redundancy you need (Battery backup cache? Redundant controllers? Hardware environmental controls?)
If you are looking for good pci cards, I would strongly suggest a card from 3ware, and a card from a place such a Seagate. Getting a super-duper cheap card when terabytes of data are on the line is just fundamentally stupid. You can save some bucks now, but be ready with your next Ask Slashdot: "How do I recover data from my dead RAID?" Seagate now has a nice 5 year warranty, which match well with good quality and reasonably cheap drives. Look at some of the SATA drives like the Barracuda. However, any decent quality drive maker can work. If you have even more money, you can look at some of the things offered by places like StorCase. A larger initial investment can become cheaper as you scale up the cheap harddrive count, and it can be a good thing in the long run. Obviously, the more time you are willing to invest doing things yourself, the cheaper you can get to some extent vs premade items. However, no support as well.
Do read up on some of the fundamentals of RAID: Everything you need to know (and lots you don't) is probably at least mentioned in the PC Guide on RAID. Look through that. Things like hot swap and hot spares are important to understand. Finally, you should remember to check compatability. Unfortunately, I for instance have not been able to find much of anything in the way of controller cards that is compatable with OS X (except the obvious, the XServe RAID). So I have something set up on a BSD box in my server closet that I then link to, more like a storage appliance. Happily, the 3ware cards and many others are now compatable with a wide variety of *nix and BSD flavors along Windows, but do check to make sure.
Last but not least, remember this!: RAID is *not* a backup solution, but an highly redundant onsite storage system. Have another form of backups, even if it is just a RAID 1 off site, or DVD-Rs, or something. If a disaster happens (thieves, fire, nuclear destruction, John Ashcroft) on site storage won't save you.
Promise has a nice off-the-shelf solution and you can get it for arround $3600.
If I were going to do it I'd build it my own by combining a nice case and a 12 port 3Ware controller with whatever server configuration and SATA drives I wanted to get.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
Besides, you know you want flashing blue, green, and red LEDs :P
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
I suppose with eXtra Problems SP 2 coming out, and looooooongtimehorn arriving really sooooon, this is a serious question for home users to consider.
Assuming you already have a spare PC lying around, all you need is get 10x 250GB drives off eBay (~$150/ea), use 2 Promise ATA133 controllers (~40/ea) to control 8, and secondary channel of your MB to do the remain 2. Build it into a RAID5 and you have 2TB of cheap storage with some measure of fault tolerance. It won't give you blazing fast performance, but it's not bad either. All this for about $1600. Just set one up myself. In terms of value, it's really hard to beat. Make sure you have 2+ spare drives lying around in case the active drives start dying.
I threw myself a fairly cheap but high capacity file server together for a coupla of thou (£). Tyan dual Athlon MP board to get me some PCI-X slots, a 3ware 8 port SAAT RAID card, a giganic and six hard drives all in a nice 4U from Antec. It's only got 500GB of space in it, btu I'm only using 6 of the 8 ports, and only one of the RAID1 arrays has 250GB drives in it.
Hard drives are much cheaper now that when I got mine, and the Antec I use has space for quite a few hard drives (9 IIRC) - if you bought a case that was mroe designed for stacks of hard drives (this is just a generic file server) then you'd be laughing.
That said, the Apple XServe looks very tempting for the price.
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
Both EMC and NetApp offer rack-mount type systems with 1 to 16 IDE or SATA drives and they all support 160GB to 250Gb drives (but neither haver certified the 300's yet). Its not a server case... more of a SAN/NAS type case and run the individual providers software, but they're all I know of. I haven't yet found a case that can handle 10 or more drives. I've managed to put 6 SATAs into a huge case with a 600watt power supply, but even if you could fit 10 drives in a case, the power supply would be your main restriction, especially when you consider you'd still want your CD/DVD drive and possiby a floppy. Plus, if you use SATA or SCSI, you'll want some better cooling. By the time you add up the power req's of the drives and cooling, you need 2x600watt power supplies or something similar...
Only comes with a 1 year warranty? I'm sorry, but if I'm gonna be spending over $1,000 for a storage solution, it better come with a 3 or 5 year warranty at the least. Heck all of the new Seagate drives come with 5 years warranty!
eTrade SUCKS
Heck, just stick your rotting optical media in a jar filled with liquid nitrogen and wait for holographic storage.
i nd ex.html
http://www.inphase-technologies.com/technology/
Only $150 at CableMart, Inc, with free shipping.
We've built two 2-TB NASs with this Skyhawk case and are working on a third right now. The case is a 5u, 10 bay, industrial strength one that's damn sturdy.
Throw in a decent power supply, a 3ware 8506 8 or 12 port SATA RAID card (or the equiv. for standard IDE), 8 data and 2 system drives (7200 rpm SATA or IDE), some Kingwin BK-81 drive bays, an inexpensive motherboard and chip (Biostar M7VIZ w/ an Athlon XP 2800), and a gig or two of value RAM (make sure it's compatible), and maybe gigabit eternet, and you've got a nice little RAID or backup system for 3K or less.
Offers 1 TB of storage at RAID 10, 1.75 TB with RAID 5, or 1.5 TB with RAID 5 and a hot standby.
Simple, easy, effective -- if I had the capital, I'd probably just re-sell these...
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
I have a 3x300GB array made of just off the shelf 3.5" Aluminum enclosures from CompUSA. They're hooked up via USB2 and quick enough for my needs since they primarily store contraband that I don't access all that often.
It's running at RAID 5 via Mac OS X and software called RAID Toolkit from FWB Software. Great stuff, never failed and was fairly cheap..
Enclosures = 3x$40
Hard Drives = 3x$250
Software = $99
$3.00 per raw GB... but RAID 5 I only realize about 550GB so that's about $5.30ish I guess.
I just wasted your mod points! HA!
That's one thing that I always appreciate product builders keeping an eye on - for example, the 3.5tb XServe RAID, while more expensive (and providing more features), specifies maximum heat output of 1365 btu for the disk array and 990 for the server (assuming all 17 disks running full tilt with both G5s pegged). Not bad for a 4.25tb system. Under lower load, heat output from both drops substantially.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
We considered the Xserve , but eventually went with this box instead:
http://www.rackable.com/products/storage.htm
Incidently, I believe the Xserve RAID box is just a SAN unit, so you'd still need a front-end server (like a G5) to actually "serve" the disk.
Get one of the Gateway 840 storage arrays, its a rebadged nStor box. 1TB is minimally $4,749. 3TB is $7,149.
Alternatively, you could buy it nearly empty, (3 250GB drives) and get it for $4,499. With 250GB SATA drives for 'only' $200/piece you could fill it for $6,299 instead of paying $7,149.
It beats out a xserve even *without* academic prices.
-- dieman - Scott Dier
I've always wanted an offsite backup for my sentimental data, such as family pics and recordings of karaoke. I'm sure other people want this too--anybody know of a "backup buddy" type of service, where you keep backups for other people, whilst they keep backups for you? That way if your house does burn down / computer stolen / etc, you would still have your sentimental data.
I mean, nowadays, who hasn't got a few gigs to spare? Plus there could be a requirement that you can only have others backup as much as your are backing up for others. Kind of a bit torrent idea, but not quite.
Those who can, do.
Those who cannot, teach.
Those who think they can but cannot, manage.
I see some people have suggested using rackmount cases. While this is a good solution, it only makes sense if you have a server cabinet/rack to put them in. Otherwise they will take up lots of horizontal space.
Also, depending on the rackmount case you get, heat can become a factor. Since everything is cramped so close together you will need multiple fans. I have a few servers, and when I test them in my house, they are SO LOUD it's unbearable. Yes 7 fans in a 2U case will seriously annoy you.
Just some things to consider before jumping in.
eTrade SUCKS
I'm using a nexSan storage array to do D2D backups. It's one of the smaller models (only One Terrabyte) There's another company that makes these too. They use ATA/RAID and are very cheap. The NexSan 1TB cost approx $7000 6 months ago.
Promise VTrak 15100
AC&NC JetStor SATA 412S
No need for a terabyte of storage if you just compress it with this cool program I found! Just type "rm -rf /*" at the command line and it'll compress everything on your drive down to nothing! Much more efficient than zip or tar or anything else.
I'm still trying to figure out what the decompress command is though...
RAID 5:
12 x 250GB WD SATA HDs (10 data, 1 parity, 1 hot spare) = $2064 from Newegg
Card:
3ware Escalade 12 port RAID 5 card: $770
Case:
Lian-Li Black Aluminum ATX Full Tower Case: $311
PS:
Two Antec 550 Watt Power Supply With 2 Fans (wired together so they turn on at the same time): $204
2.5TB, or about 310 uncompressed DVDs (full ISO), for $3,349. And you havent bought a motherboard, processor, RAM, boot HD, etc.
I'm looking to do the same thing, store my DVDs on my computer, and in full ISO. The problem is that good RAID 5 controller cards are expensive. You could take a risk and use windows dynamic disks and do software RAID-5 (or the equivalent in linux) but you run the risk of low performance (which isnt a big deal if you only use it for backup and only read a few DVDs at a time). I've got an IC7-MaxIII, which has in total 6 SATA ports on it, and I'm tempted to do windows dynamic disks because I dont need performance since its not a fileserver, just being used to store DVDs and watch them occasionally. Even 6 250GB HDs will provide me with about 1TB of space, or about 125 DVDs. I'd need a new case and power supply if I went up from there...
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
These look simple and I am sure once you bought the 80GB one, you could hack as many drives as you want into it. Pug Servers http://www.pugservers.com/
10% attrition? In my case, I can't remember a CD-R I recorded that ever failed (I don't use CD-RW, maybe these are something else...). All my source backup are on CD-R, and I make quite a lot of them. I also burn a *lot* of music compilations for my car. Some of the CD-R there stopped working after (quite) a while, but it is only because a car is a harsh environment for a CD-R.
The CD-R brand must have something to do with it. I only use Sony's CD-R. Not for a particular reason. Only that none of them ever failed me.
Thus, my opinion is that CD-R are one of the bests (if not the best) solutions for non-industrial backups. By industrial, I mean freaking mission-critial multi-GB multi-millions dollars worth backups.
Note: I never tried DVD-R. You must code a *lot* of lines to make your projects' sources weight more than 700 mb. (Hum, quick cvs tree check: 75 mb... ok, I might be wrong here. However, these 75 mb were a *lot* of work for me...)
perception is reality
any link to the "nusl2" box? i cant find any product on linksys site with that product id.
google also comes up empty.
Now, for extra security, *make the same machine*, and put it on a buddy's/relative's broadband line for nightly rsyncs (do the first rsync on the home LAN, though ;). Give them free techsupport, or backup space on the box, etc.
Total cost, $1800. Offsite backup, esp. on different power grid and internet backbone, is a lifesaver.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Really Expensive Array of Disks
Dell makes a really nice rack-mounted hardware raid system. We are using these at my work, and they are pretty slick. You get redundent power supplies, hot swappable drives, all fast SCSI, with completely configurable raid levels. You can choose to split the drives to be on two distinct raid arrays, or put everything on the same array. The unit will beep and even email you when one of the drives fails. With the tech support from Dell, when this happens they have sent us a replacement drive within 24 hours. We keep a spare drive around as well, and you just pop out the old one, pop in the new one, and it rebuilds everything with no downtime. I'm sure it's not super cheap, but if you really need a good raid system this would be what I would recommend. I don't know if this will work, but here is a link to their small business storage solutions page. -FC
I bought one of these, eight 300-gig drives, and some of these to mount the drives in the 5.25" bays. Add in a couple of Highpoint IDE controllers, some cheap power splitters, and you're set.
Eight drives in RAID 5 gives me two terabytes of storage, mounting the drives in the 5.25" bays gives room for airflow, and the fans on the mounting brackets keep them somewhat cool for increased longevity. If memory serves, I could still shove in at least one extra drive.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
- Find any tall beige-box case. ($150)
- Find 9 good 250g Serial ATA drives. ($100 each = $900)
- Get an 8-port serial ATA hardware RAID controller like these ($300)
- Get a good 400-500W power supply ($200)
- Any motherboard and CPU will do ($200)
- Spend a few extra bucks on gigabit ethernet ($50)
Put 8 of the hard drives into a RAID-5 array. (1 for your O.S/system use). That makes about 1.4 TB for only $1800 total. The 3Ware IDE raid thing works great with FreeBSD, which is what we use for everything.Rip all your CDs as FLAC so that (1) you never have to rip them again (it's lossless), but (2) it's half the size of saving WAV files
At least that's what we've done with our 68,000 CDs we have here.
Seagate now has a nice 5 year warranty, which match well with good quality and reasonably cheap drives. Look at some of the SATA drives like the Barracuda.
I dunno about the SATA bit. SATA is new, and I've seen quirkiness with Linux and SATA controllers thus far. I think it might be safer to let other people hit all the issues first, and let the drivers be solidified.
May we never see th
Why hoard gigabytes of data? Not like you'r going to USE all of it at same time. You can't watch 10 movies at same time, you can't listen to 100 mp3'z at same time. As for non-media data, 4x250GB hard drives is 90% of the time enough for anything you want to store. And if you need more, rethink your software/design/media/whatever you'r using the space for. The only place where I can imagine you would need such amounts of disk space is probably places where it would make sense to have clusters et al anyway, so its not a question at all anymore.
Anyway - You don't need that much data. Some guy once said (as a joke): "He who has more things when he dies wins". You don't need that much space. If you want to hoard warez - hell, you can get them at any moment again from internet.
So, the short answer to your question is - If you store stuff you dload off inet - don't. You can always re-download. And if you store stuff you'r working with - rethink your work.
Madcat.
Our company bought a 1.37TB NAS unit from Fastora, and I've been quite pleased with it. Easy web-based configuration, simple drive swapping, and RAID 5 goodness with a hot-spare. Ours also came with a Gbit Ethernet adapter, and ran around $7,000.
There is a difference between "insightful" and "inciteful" other than spelling.
I have also been thinking about this storage problem for a while. From what I can see, the 3ware raid card witha pile of cage mounted SATA drives for hot swap access seems like the way to go. A good raid 5 configuration should protect you against any hardware failure. The key is to have a few spare drives to pop in if one failes. Raid Arrays can often surive the single failure, but a cluster of failures and your hosed. But alas this only protects you from hardware failure, and in my experiance user or software failure happen more often. To protect against software failure Im looking at setuping FS snapshots, using snapshot backups are great, they relive most user fialures. I once had to support 10000 users with homes in NFS. Backup requests due to user error were killing support times. The tape drives were burning up as they were running 100% either doing the nights backups or restores for some moron that 'dont know how the file was deleted'. Our fix was to use snapshots in each users home .snapshot/weekly daily hourly. NetAPP filers supply a similar functionality. With this we went from about 10 restores a day to 0 for 8 months. So once you get your raid card in, the next thing is to install an OS that keeps good FS snapshots, and cron the hell out if it. Count on enough space to lock down all the data after Major changes. This poor mans revision contorol can really save you as its enforced by the OS, and not some user space magic, as much as we all love CVS. Bot Linux and many *BSD's support Snapshots.
With 400GB SATA disks around the corner, nearly 6TB of data in 3U is possible.
SuperMicro SC932T-R760 with triple-redundant power supply and hot swap fans.
A 14-disk (two channel) SCSI version is also available.
He turned around and asked his collegue if they had any terabyte compact flash cards. His friend smiled and with a condescending look told me that terabyte compact flash cards didn't exist yet but they probably would soon. He then asked if I wanted him to check the prices on the 1gig card so I acquiesed. I thought that would take too much effort to explain that his friend needed a refresher on his removable media sizes so I just didn't bother and thought that he'd probably just laugh about it with some of his more knowledgeable friends.
I just asked him for the price for the 1gig compact flash and then jokingly asked him if I could do a preorder on the terabyte compact flash for when it comes out. He said that they didn't take pre-orders that far down the road. I laughed and left! :)
I'd love to see George W. Bush fired too, but what does this have to do with the topic at hand?
We need Macintosh power. I *am* Macintosh power!
All the Dell stuff uses SCSI drives and thus is totally expensive.
Go figure, inexpensive storage from EMC... Clariion AX100 . 3 TB that'll fit in a 2U space for $9536 at sanspot
I disagree with what you say, but I'll defend your right to say it to the death - Voltaire
I have two systems, with about 1.3 and 2.5 TB respectively for archiving DVD quality video and MP3s. I looked at RAID but found it was not necessary. I prefer to manage the disks (some are removable) and do not need high performance even when streaming the video over my in home LAN.
I use DVArchive with DVD or satellite to ReplayTV for video capture and play back, DVA is great for managing multiple volumes and dynamically discovers vidoes if I want to move them to another drive. It also supports copy/move between the two systems (I use a 1Gb switch between systems). CPU performance is not key for play back though it is critical for transcoding (I use a dual processor system for transcoding and it smokes my single CPU system).
I have a LARGE MP3 collection (forgive me for not publically admitting to its size) and I find the same systems/drives are ample for supporitng a digital audio library. I switched to iTunes for managing music (MusicMatch melts down when the number of files gets large) and stream it with SlimServer to squeezebox devices for high quality playback on home theater and other receivers.
My recommendation is to go with generic disk drives - brand names, 7200 RPM with 1-3 year warranties --I get them locally on sale for under $150, sometimes $130/250GB, thats 52 cents per GB, a little more per GB than a DVD-R disk but more reliable and infinitely more flexible. I can recreate a DVD off of the disk image if needed.
I am more concerned with heat and power consumption (it adds up) than disk performance, someone will need to explain to me why I'd need to mess with RAID for this...
Somebody describes building a terabyte storage server at http://www.finnie.org/terabyte/ with Linux and hardware and software RAID. Total cost = less than $1,600
I just built a 2+ terabyte machine, for a lot less money. It doesn't have to be that expensive. Here's how to do it for a lot less:
1. Throw out the idea of the 3ware card. I've used them. They're overpriced pieces of crap. Responsiveness under load is horrible. Linux's software RAID works much better. Savings: $770
2. Use 300-gig drives. Fewer of them means a much cheaper casew ($124 in my case). Savings: $200
3. Two 550-watt power supplies? Stop believing the crap in the overclocking forums. The relatively cheap 400-watt power supply that came with the case easily powers eight 300-gig drives and a dual processer motherboard. Savings: $204
(Out of a good number of single- and multi-CPU systems, I have exactly two that couldn't run on a 400-watt power supply: And they both have four processers in them.)
Total savings: >$1,000
If you're thinking of using Windows on this, well, maybe you need the hardware RAID controller. Under Linux, the software RAID implementation is second to none - and I can guarantee that your host CPU will crank out parity in amounts that one of 3ware's cards can't even dream of. Combined with Samba, nothing on your network will know that it's not talking to a Windows machine.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Many DVDs these days are double capacity (nearly 10G).
Just buy one of these external USB/Firewire terabyte drives for $1200. No fuss, and you can plug in a few of them to a single machine if you want.
I made a PHP/MySQL library that prevents SQL injection & makes coding easier!
I maintain a filelist of all files on each backup DVD... and I just grep the filelists to find out which DVD I need to pull.
If I had a dvd jukebox, I wouldn't need to physically pull the backup dvd.
Next, I'm using a 3ware 7810, which is an 8 port PATA/100 RAID controller. I'm currently using 7 ports with 120GiB Seagate drives for 3/4 a terrabyte of storage. (I want to put a hot-spare on the 8th port when I can afford it.)
Including a beefy Antec power supply, the case, the drives, and the RAID controller, it all comes in in the neighborhood of $1000. (Don't forget to add in mainboard, CPU, RAM, Network, etc. in your calculations.)
Overall, I'm extremely happy, although being as how it's PATA it's a bit cramped in their with all the cables, but I've done some work ensuring there's no excessive amounts of ribbons around the case. Likewise, I've mounted thermally controlled fans on exhaust and high-range stealth fans on intake everywhere so things keep reasonably cool. However, while the Seagates I chose for low noise and despite adding some sound dampening as well, it's still not a quiet box.
Here's my setup:
That's 1TB of fault-tolerant storage for under $1500, the only sticking point being that you have to put it together yourself. Every hard drive has it's own IDE channel for speed and reliability, and the array can tolerate a drive failure and be rebuilt. Samba allows the server to communicate flawlessly with both linux and windows systems. I've been using this setup for several months and have experienced no issues. Many cases are made that can hold the six drives, though a few may have to go into the 5" slots normally reserved for CD drives and the like.
If you need more reliability, build another server with 4 x 250GB drives (no RAID) and set it to copy backup data nightly. Having your data in two separate boxes helps improve it's chances of survival in the event that physical damage occurs to one box (fire, theft, water, overheating, etc.) You already have fault-tolerant raid in the first box, so just go with 4 non-raid drives in the backup and you have a solution that would satisfy all but the most paranoid individuals.
For some reason, if you want many 3.5" hard drive bays, you have to buy a HUGE case, as if your motherboard was proportionally huge or you needed a dozen CD-ROM drives. Whatever.
The Lian-Li PC-V2100 holds twelve 3.5" drive, and most importantly, allows space between each one for airflow. Older cases would stack the drives in contact, causing terrible heat buildup.
I think the recent Fry's 160GB for $70 sale (no rebate) spawned a whole bunch of RAID projects this week, mine included.
All you need are 1,000 Gmail accounts and you're set. No expensive drives to worry about!
About 6 months ago I was in the market for some extra home storage. My solution was the following: 2 * 9 gig Scsi drives for OS - Raid1 5 * 250 gig Maxtor Maxline 2 - Raid5, 25% redundancy I build a machine round Gentoo, using software raid. The drives were picked because of the assurance of being able to use them 24/7 by Maxtor. I also picked the 5400 spin to reduce heat (storage was the issue, not speed). Put them into a standard half-tower case (4 ide in the bottom, 1 in the top, along with the 2 scsi os drives). Controlled by a standard PCI (promice) IDE controller, and an old amd500 with motherboard. The only down side, its full, and my backup dvds are all over the place again =) /dev/md1 935G 934G 1.4G 100% /home/ftp
I'm sure I could get some photos of the finished machine if anyone wants.
The cheapest way I know is still a large PC tower case, a 3ware SATA raid controller a big PSU and a couple of large fans withs attitude. On the PCI side you don't need much unless you want to do gigabit (or of course just shove your server in the same case and dont do the I/O networked)
I never knew this, and apparently many others didn't either, but if you use hardware RAID the disks are tied to that card.
m l#28
More info here, plus the ever-acidic jwz calling people dumbasses, dipshits, and more fun!
http://jwz.livejournal.com/368307.html
http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2004/07.ht
John Kerry is a Joke!
I work for an integrator that does nothing but storage solutions.
There are many solutions that support 10 or more hard drives. However, they are not inexpensive. Xyratex makes these enclosures and I would say they are the cheapest considering the functionality. Nexsan is another one. If you go with a manufactured solution I would recommend you look at other things than price. Some enclosures just fall apart after time.
This is too much effort for even most people with 50 cds or dvds. Rot is bad, but it takes a while. I'm confident that within 2 or 3 years, I'll be able to store the 100 or 200 dvds I'll have burned on some kind of readily available, cheap HD.
Just put together out second 2TB array today, We use the Promise UltraTrak SX8000, this is an 8x ATA disc array --> SCSI. The tower I put together today uses 8 (well 9.. one for hot swapping) WD 2500JD drives. The tower takes care of the actual RAID subsystem, we use, 5, though it supports 1, 10, 3, 30, 5, and 50, and possibly others.
This setup yeilds 1.75TB of usable space, at a cost of $3,708 (if you buy it from MWave good upport, and the best prices I have seen on this stuff), or a realized cost of $2.12/GB. If you go with WD2000JD drives you can save some money, coming in at $3,258 or $2.04/GB.
It's always surprised me how few people practice this, but i've always found it more than worth the expense. I think the best home user/poor boy setup is to have a medium sized primary HD (40GB or so, but it can be anything) and then a secondary HD (100GB+) for storing ALL data, files, etc. I know it's elementary, but it's really nice to be able to wipe a HD (winders users) without worrying about backing up anything to CD/DVD/Tape/punch card. You could also, of course, create a small raid system for pretty cheap.
A 250 GB USB 2.0 disk with enclosure and power supply costs about $170. That's $0.68/GB. If you want 1Tb of storage, that's by far the cheapest way to go. FireWire is not significantly more expensive either. Furthermore, Linux lets you do software RAID across those devices.
A 1TB PenguinComputing RAID server with SATA and 1G of RAM will set you back about $4200, still a lot cheaper than Apple with academic prices, let alone Apple's regular price of $6000. And the Linux machine will come with a choice of easy-to-use web-based configuration utilities, time-tested remotely accessible graphical administration utilities, and command line administration utilities. Furthermore, it has high-quality server software for SMB, Webdav, and NFS.
So, yes, it really is "just you". The XServe is nearly 50% more expensive than the comparable Linux machine and comes with much less software and much less choice in software. And the XServe is more than 4x as expensive as adding disk enclosures to an existing machine, which also can be configured as RAID drives under Linux.
I too have been looking into this. I am looking at buying a cheap 3u case with 14 PATA drive trays, getting 14 250GB PATA drives, 14 PATA to U160 SCSI adapters (http://www.addonics.com/products/io/ide_scsi.asp) , connecting it to a SCSI controller and using software raid. I am looking for something that works with OSX and all the SATA solution don't and straight SCSI is too expensive.
$700 3u case w/ 14 PATA drive trays
$2520 14 250GB PATA drives (3.5TB)
$966 14 PATA to U160 SCSI adapter
$4186 TOTAL
$1.19 per GB
My main concern is what kind of performance hit will there be with the PATA to SCSI adapter. From what I have read it sounds like none.
I worked out that the cheapest way, by far, to add storage is to just put an IDE hard drive in a PC. I have two on a network. If you run out of controllers before you run out of space, buy a PCI IDE card. Sod RAID for backups, buy a DVD burner, I've got a dual layer one, just waiting for media.
I too have been looking at these but can't find one that would survive a RAID controller that fails. The only solution offered is software mirroring, but then I lose half my drive space. That is, I can't find a solution for under $40,000.
We (The Binghamton University Computer Science Department) employ 2 debian raid servers. They make use of a 3ware ATA 12-port card and their (3ware's) hot-swap enclosures (whoever said hot-swapping with ATA is not possible is incorrect, we do it).
It uses a 9 external 5.25 bay case (enlight) with an Antec 550W power supply to handle the 12 drives (plus a seagate system drive in the internal 3.5" bay). This has worked very well.
We use Maxtor 300GB drives in one machine (RAID55) and have lost 5 of 20 drives we purchased in 6 months. The other uses Western Digital 200GB (RAID5), and we've lost 1 of 12 in a year. Manufacturer DOES matter. WD replaced our drive in days, Maxtor makes you jump through hoops and tries to deny the problem for a while, just to finally decide to replace the drive, then take 5-7 mroe days to get it to you.
All in all, these machines cost us under 7K each and perform very well. However, if I bought one today, I'd get 3ware's SATA card and Seagate's new 400GB SATA drives instead. Whoever said ATA cables are a pain was NOT wrong, and these drives would give much better performance.
It doesn't cost much to have a lot of storage. We need to move about 1.5TB of data between offices. To do that I built a system that we could just ship over and back. It's an AMD64 3000+ w/ a 3Ware 9500 8 port card and 8 250GB Hitachi SATA drives in RAID5. Total cost for everything was like $3K. That's a steal for 1.6TB of usable space.
Pogolinux.com.
I've got one at work, 16 drive, SATA raid 5 at 2.2TB.
You can use any OS that'll handle it (Redhat AS3 on mine).
They simply rock, and one of the dudes maintains fedoralegacy.org (IIRC).
Cool.
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
The Arena isn't as good as the Nexsan. I've seen similar Nexsan units go for $2K on ebay. I highly recommend them. Easily does 70M/sec with RAID5.
My Arena uses 120GB WD's and the Nexan uses 300GB Maxtor's. I have a deployed Arena 8 drive unit with 250GB Maxtor's serving as a live backup for a network. Paid less than $800 for that unit.
http://www.nexsan.com/
http://www.maxtronic.com/
I don't understand why people automatically assume that DVD+-R/RWs are prone to the same problem. The recordable layer in these disks is buried in plastic. It's NOT on the surface. There's no oxygen coming to it, so in theory DVD+-R/RWs should be a heck of a lot less prone to "rot".
And i've installed quite a bit of these:
* SuperMicro motherboard (any of the newer ones, depend on your choice of architecture). Be sure to get one with PCI 133/64 and gigabit onboard.
* 3Ware RAID board(s).
* Chembro rackmount cases (they have a very nice one with 16 SATA hotplug slots with backplane and all)
* Don't go cheap on the power supply. You'll need at least 600W. I always go for redundant ones.
* 16 SATA disks of your choice (250, 120 or 80GB)
* Linux!!! (Be careful with fedora core2, it doesnt support nativelly the 3Ware cards - you'll need to compile your own)
Of course you could save about $1000 by using a cheap motherboard, chassis and PS. But it really pays off using the good brands on those.
By the way, you should always get an extra hard drive (or two). They will fail (sooner or later) and you don't want to be left hanging.
If you own more than fifty CD/DVDs, it can be a daunting task to find a file.
That's only the case if you fail to a) label your media and b) use a decent piece of cataloging software and c) keep your media in some semblence of order ;).
Using something like SuperCat in conjunction with basic media labelling (disc 1, disc 2, etc) makes finding files a breeze, in my experience at least.
http://www.redstore.com/fx/techinfo.php?itm_code=L ACSTO030
Of course it helps to be within driving distance of a Fry's...
If its not your money, sure, buy it off the shelf. If it is your money, build your own.
-AS
http://attotech.com/diamond/index.html
8TB for about $30,000 US... all in a 3U rack. Can you beat that?
At work, we use several of openstorage's products, tape enclosures etc.
So far their dual SDLT35000 based tape rig has proven itself. We also use a few of the Omega scsi arrays.
If you just want flat out space, I'd recommend this:
http://www.openstore.com/disk-atabeast.htm
The atabeast!
It has a pentiumII of some speed in the box, so the raid is all handled in it, and it presents itself as scsi drives, just as you would expect from a raid enclosure.
Trying to convince people at work this is the way to go. About the same price as a raid card for the sun machines.......
it seems to me that the soft raid makes more sense than a hard raid
with a hard raid, if the controller goes, you're screwed
with a soft raid, there is no such problem
or am i totally off base?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If you're really looking for "backup" as in something you can dump your data to and then secure, your best bet is to build a machine from lowend parts.
Consider the Gigabyte 7NNXP motherboard. I have one. It has 4 IDE ports and 2 SATA ports. That's 10 drives worth of controller right there. Take one, throw it in a cheap case with many bays. I see an 11 bay case, 7 3.5 and 4 5.25 on pricewatch for $20 + 7.95 shipping with a 400W power supply. More than adequate.
Figure a cheap CPU, say a $50 Athlon XP, maybe less if you scrounge one, and some cheap RAM, $50 gets you about 512MB these days, and again you might even have some lying around. Throw any junk video card in you want. $50 worth of video card and you could even be playing Doom3 at medium quality on this thing, the power you get per dollar is ridiculous these days.
The motherboard has gigabit ethernet built in. Just hook it up to your machine, use vinum or whatever to raid the drives and have it rsync your files to the HDs, and you're set. Then take the entire machine and PUT IT AWAY. Like say someplace that won't be affected if the house floods or burns down.
So let's tally up the cost here:
$170 motherboard
$30 case (shipped)
$50 CPU
$50 memory
$50 video card?
That's $350 total. Guess what, a 4 port 3ware STARTS around $350. You might get a last-generation 8port for $350, and an 8port RaidCore card also goes for $350. Plus this setup has a cpu impact of zero, it doesn't clutter your main case with drives and cables, and you can use it as a spare machine in case your primary goes down, just throw an emergency boot partition on the 2TB of space or so it'll have.
The remaining cost is just how much you're willing to spend on drives. But you still haven't spent more than a typical highend RAID controller and you've got way more processing power and flexibility.
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
It has up to 14 (7 per 2 controllers) 250GB ATA-100 drives. We have one and it smokes. We're getting about 300MBps throughput (yes, a capital B). Not too shabby...
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
I was just researching this, I myself am making a 1 TB storage server. I have come up with the following solution. 1 Broadcom BC4852 Serial ATA Raid drive. Now this thing works wonders, and only costs (approx) 362$. It can change raid levels without bringing it down (IE, start with 1 HD, pop another in once you buy it, SATA is hotswap, and Move to raid 1 or Raid 0 automagically, pop another in and go raid 5.), it supports 8 drives PER controller, and you can use 4 controllers (AND THEY ALL ACT AS ONE). This means you can have up to 8 TERRABYTES using 250 GB drives, or 7.75 TB raid 5. The 160 GB drives are about 169$ a piece so add a basic motherboard and chassis and you got a full system. Dont forget a bunch of drive trays if you want to hot swap.
JetStor SATA Model 416S:l
= 3& s=304&pid=62
http://www.acnc.com/02_01_jetstor_sata_416s.htm
16 Sata Drives Pumped into a Onboard convertor that turns the SATA Raid into a scsi drive so any system with scsi can access it.
Coolermaster Stacker + 3 Sata in 5.25 bay:
http://www.atruereview.com/cm_stacker/index.php
For the DYIers Just get a CMstacker from coolermaster and add in 5 X (Three Sata drive bay per two 5.25) with 11 5.25 bays you could have 15 Sata drives and the server in the same tower Plus a cdrom drive. Somewhere around 2,200 for Case and
SATA bays.
Chenbro 24 SATA 5U rackmount:
http://www.chenbro.com.tw/product/product.jsp?p
This is a good step up for people looking to build there own RAID. Many online shops sell this and add in the MB and SATA controllers and sell it as ther RAID Servers.
Each of these are not realy cheap answers but still way cheaper then Apples Xraids. But if you are talking Terabytes then nothing is realy cheap. Keep in mind you that the Apple Xraids have very good support and maintance for it's price. Below is just storage not full systems.
Xserve Raid
Host Interface Fiber
Disk Interface PATA
Drive Bays 14
Drive Cap. 250GB
MAX Cap. 3.42TB
Base Cost $8,799.00
Cost per Tera $2,574.34
Cost per drive $628.50
Chenbro 24 bay
Host Interface Int. Sata Raid
Disk Interface SATA
Drive Bays 24
Drive Cap. 250GB
MAX CAp. 5.86TB
Base Cost $10,020.00
Cost per Tera $1,710.08
Cost per drive $417.50
Life is marked by pain.
I put together my own RAID 5 cluster. Saved money buy building the case myself. Plus I had never seen a clear rackmount case before.
e arcas e/clearcase.html
Here is a getto webpage about it.
http://www.pipe2grep.com/~aamartin/images/cl
In my server cage I have a full tower with a basic mobo plus a 4 port (8 drive) Promise ATA100 raid controller with 8 120 gig drives. Cases aren't hard to find with around 7 internal 3.5 inch bays and 1 or 2 open 3.5 and 3 or 4 open 5.25 inch bays. I think I paid $45 for my case + 300W power supply then I threw a decent 450W PS in there that I think I gave like $55 for. Total storage is just about 600 gigs with RAID-5. It wasn't that expensive I had 3 or 4 120's lying around from server pulls and RMA returns. The pc itself is like a Celeron 1.7 or something I had lying around and I put a new cheapie DVD drive in there to rip with. Most expensive part I had to buy was the card which I believe was $69 or $99 from mwave.com. Popped RH9 on there and now I can ftp backups for 65 servers into one spot.
At home I have about 2.2 terabytes across 3 pc's, one has an onboard 4 port SATA raid controller and 4x160G drives for a total usable space of around 600 gigs, another has 4 or 5 80 gig drives, a 120 and a 60 in a Windows XP uhm, Volume set that's it of around 640 gigs! And another pc has an onboard ATA100 raid with 2 ports (4 drives) 120x4 and a 60gig to boot off of for a total of about 510 gigs usable.
I have all my DVD's and CD's ripped and I can play them from anywhere, I have PC's hooked to all my TV's and networked, and I removed the DVD players from the stereo cabinet, it was redundant. It's quite nifty actually.
You can put together a terabyte storage system for peanuts using basic stuff. Onboard 4 drive raid controller 4 250 gig drives boom there ya go. Install OS if your choice. Get more fancy, pop a 4 port ATA controller on there for 8 drives a bigger power supply and you could encroach on the 2 terabyte game without getting into "server class" products other than I'd spring for a "server class" power supply maybe redundant even.
--- www.f-theocean.com
when you buy a new 1000baseT ethernet card it can potentialy hit 1,000,000,000 bits per second. The storage and networking worlds use the true meanings of Kilo = thousand, Mega = million, Giga = billion, Tera = trillion, Peta = Quadrillion ...
You don't see peaple bitching that they paid to travel a Kilometer in a taxi but they only went 1000 meters...
The problem is actually that WAY back in conputing history the term kilo was misappropriated because there was no verbal shorthand for 1024. Since then we have come up with the alternative terms of KiBi(KiloBinary) = 1024(2^10); MeBi = 1,048,576(2^20); GeBi = 1,073,741,824(2^30); TeBi = 1,099,511,627,776(2^40)...
Check out http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Byte.html
http://www.bipm.org/en/si/prefixes.html
http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html
for more info.
I must admit that they sound a bit funny though...
<This .sig left intentionally blank>
Or, buy it off the shelf if you want reliability and performance.
Not to knock you, but software RAID 5 performance sucks ass. If 30 MB/sec is sufficient, go with it. If you want better performance (Xserve RAID can do about 340 MB/sec sustained in RAID 5), other solutions may be better.
As for the drives... sure, go with the Fry's drives. They're not QA'd but that's your perogative.
Xserve RAID may well be overkill for this... I think Promise makes a controller/enclosure that costs about $2K and can take standard IDE/SATA drives in its sleds... that will end up being cheaper than the Xserve RAID but more than a frankenbox running Linux software RAID.
This is something I put together just from looking at current prices on websites. I've never built such a thing, but it was interesting just to play around with the idea of it. I'm sure people could find a lot to critique about the stuff listed below, keep in mind it was mostly just an excercise to explore the process of building a fileserver. The cool part is this, if properly built, would be very nearly enterprise grade (using servers from IBM, Dell and Apple as reference), with 16 hot swappable SATA drives (4TB raw capacity, 2TB with a decent RAID config to protect against drive failure), and 200mb/sec speeds (that being more than enough for most of us, considering we'd be accessing it over a LAN). The price is actually really good, too... which leads me to believe I might be skimping big time. But then again, I was just trying to build something for personal use. Note: CPU muscle isn't really needed on a pure fileserver. The RAID card's manufacturer claims CPU use won't even climb above 3% at highest output. Specs Motherboard/CPU/RAM: $500 TYAN Tiger + Athlon MP 2800 + 1GB PC2700 RAM * Onboard Gigabyte LAN Case: $1,279.00 RMC3E-XPSS. 16-hot-swppable bays w/650W power supply http://servercase.com/miva/miva?/Merchant2/merchan t.mv+Screen=PROD&Store_Code=SC&Product_Code=RMC3E- XPSS&Category_Code=RM+Disk+Array
2 RAID Controllers: $1,000
Dual 3Ware Escalade 8506-8 (8-ports)
16 Hard Drives: $2,800
16 x 250GB Maxtor 7Y250M0 250GB SATA ($175 each)
Assume $500 (!) for cables, fans, shipping, heatsinks, etc etc.
Total Price: $5,000 ($1.25/gigabyte)
Why is everyone recommending some uber fast expensive hardware raid? This is for backup, not file serving. It would be cheaper to spend the money on quality drives and use a software raid. Run some nightly backup scripts and you all set.
Here is what I used:
CodeGen S101 - big empty box where the entire face is 5.25" bays, I paid $90, now up to $129
Western Digital 250GB 7200RPM 8MB cache drives, $151 each, I went with 10 of them
I mounted one drive per 5.25" bay leaving the face open. The airflow around each drive is so good that the drives are room temp to the touch.
Seasonic 400Watt power supply (300Watt Seasonic worked powering 11 drives, dual Athlon, 6 fans, but startup is a little smoother with 400W version). Several other higher rated supplies would not even power up the machine!
I did software RAID5 using onboard IDE and a couple Promise controllers (Ultra100 and Ultra133 since they screw up if you use two Ultra133s in the machine at once).
Yes, software raid sucks in many ways. The drivers from Promise REALLY suck, in particular the lack of error detection or notification, no support for S.M.A.R.T. from Promise and so on. But I couldn't find an affordable RAID controller than handled over 2TB.
No matter how large you make it... you will fill it up, and RAID5 does not support adding more drives, so make it BIG to start with.
Has anyone played with software Raid over external drives?
This has seemed like the easiest way to go.
Get a machine and a stack of external drives next to it, when you need more space, just add drives.
Use as many internal bays as you can to avoid the cost of external cases for as long as you can.
Not the fastest solution, but much faster than reading from CD/DVDs.
However, I haven't tried it. Has anyone else?
plus-good, double-plus-good
When will people understand that ?
Just because you can buy 4*250 GB IDE disk and a 3ware 8500-4 doesn't mean it's a "storage solution".
That's ridicolous.
That's the same as calling a 20m^2 flat "real estate" or so.
cheers,
Rainer
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
If you want to spend the extra money and have a warranty and fancier case, look at Nexsan , or EMC's AX100. Scary that EMC is selling something cheaper than the competition, but they are. Sorta disturbs the natural order of the universe. Still, either will set you back several thousand. The AX100 looks pretty impressive on paper. Options for dual controllers, and up to 3 TB in a 2U space. Haven't tried one myself yet.
Disclaimer: I work for a storage integrator, both are brands we sell.
Ignorance is the root of all evil.
hey! Speedmania has those great firewirechassis for 8 harddrives. Ok it isn't 10 but almost. www.speedmania.se
Okay, I have one question for people who know more about electricity than I: How do you know how big of a power supply to use when you have 2, 4, 8, or 12 hard drives. How do you know the wattage you need to supply with 5400, 7200, and 10k? Anyone?
Zef
What about MEEPT?!?!
I've been using the Adaptec 2400a raid card and populating them with 120GB's (160's, 200's or 250's). I think we have over 30 systems out there (across the US) like this. The adaptec is a little more money than the 3ware, but Adaptec is worth it.
We also use external USB 200's or 250's to backup the files.
I had a couple of drives fail, but each time the data was safe. Just this week, rebuilt the raid array on a drive that failed.
But, a more important question, are there any linux based network storage units out there? (in this inexpensive range)
So, Fedora Core, four 250's RAID5, one 120gb for the OS, and you have 0.7 terabytes. (Of course, JBOD will get you 1.0 terabyte!) All components are off-the-shelf and readily available.
I used a combination of USB 2.0 and Firewire external drives. Maxtor 250Gb were around $230.00 retail (CompUSA purchase); Maxtor 200Gb were around $190.00 retail. The last few I put together were Belkin external USB 2.0 conversion cases with 160Gb drives I had taken from a failed RAID array.
I've got ten drives right now, performance is phenomenal, and I no longer have to worry about my son destroying the CDs or DVDs he plays with. Using Daemon Tools and Alcohol 120% I'm able to emulate the common CD protections and mount images; using scripts I can simplify the task for my son.
I have one drive dedicated as my Vault storage. It's where I keep local repositories of open source code that interests me.
The biggest problem I've run into is merging the drives seamlessly under Windows. Under Linux it's no problem. Symbolic links massed in one central directory takes care of the problem; you can schedule the script to run using cron and create the links so it is always up to date.
Under Windows it is a bit more of a pain in the ass since shortcuts aren't "true" files. A nifty piece of software I found called Winbolic Link lets me make links that behave more like symbolic links do. The only downside is I've yet to find a way to script Winbolic Link but I'm probably going to switch my fileserver over to Linux soon *anyway*.
For what it's worth I have over twenty years of games, both CD and floppy (I have Might & Magic on bootable 5.25", if you can find the drive). "Finding" a game is a disaster for me. Thankfully imaging does exist, and I can still play the original Pool of Radiance when I want.
My reality check bounced.
The HP MSA 1500 is a SATA version of its expensive SCSI cousins. Its a fully blown storage array and you can stick up to 12 or 14 drives in an enclosure. You can attach it via SCSI or Fibre. And of course you can RAID5 it, you can have hot spares, mirrored sets, whatever you need.
I got a bit arogant last year after setting up my main home server on a RAID 5 disk set, and with a tape backup plan that included weekly rotation and the ability to get back what I needed up to a month in the past. I fear I may have been a vitim of hubris however, as I spent a night at a friend of a friend's in Amsterdam and quietly dismissed his exortation to move my file system from EXT3 to XFS. I resisted because my machine was already set up, and I had insufficient drive space to do the neccessary three step dance to switch over to XFS. Hindsight is 20/20. During the honeymoon phase all was lovely, the backups occurred regularly, and the RAID drives spun reliably. Now, at some point my tape backups started to fail, but seeing as I had RAID 5 and a journaling filesystem I didn't hurry to replace the tape drive, I simply couldn't afford it anyway. Two months passed, and all was well, until one morning I got up to find the server down. Sometime over the weekend the RAID 5 array blew it's load, and trashed the file system in the process. The backups were now 2 months old, and the drives wouldn't spin up individually (two wouldn't, one was fine) so I couldn't get at the data anymore. I did have other paranoia++ copies of the most data elsewhere, but what failed to get on the backups was the digital photos I had taken in the meantime. They're on those 3 drives somewhere, but with only two working, no tape backup, and a dodgy so called journalling filesystem that was trashed I have the devils own job getting them back.
Moral of the story, don't let your guard down, two layers of protection is only the starting poing in protecting data, three is better, and make at least one of those offsite. I have the three drives set aside and labelled against the day/weekend when I can make a serious assault on getting that data back. Everyone feel free to point a finger and say "haha" in a Nelson voice, but remember, it could be you next.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
www.emc.com Simple as that
I'm actually as of last week in the process of building a new, faster 2TB box. I previous had a 1TB ATA100 setup, but now with the new 8-12x DVD burners its a little behind things.
Old setup:
P4 2.4Ghz HT
512MB DDR 400
Asus P800
WD 36GB 10kRPM Raptor OS Drive
FreeBSD 5.2.1
two 4-channel ATA-100 PCI Controller Cards
1 2-channel ATA-100
7 160GB
1 185 GB
Vinum 1TB Stripe with the 160s
185GB Separate storage
New setup:
Same Box Hardware box -- ~$500 new
Promise Technology 4port Serial ATA RAID CTLR ~$115(be sure to choose one over $100 -- they list two different models on the same page there
Promise Technology 4X SATA RAID 0-1-10-5 JBOD ~$160 + ~128MB Stick of SDRAM lying around
8 Western Digital Caviar WD2500JD 250GB ~$165 * 8 = ~$1350 w/ shipping
What you have:
Single 1TB Hardware RAID-0 Array Partition
Single 750GB Hardware RAID-5 Array Partition
Gigabit Ethernet
36GB 10K RPM OS Drive (FreeBSD 5.2.1)
HT Dual CPU Box
Total Storage: ~1.8TB
Total Cost: ~$2000
-LogicX
HornyandConfused.com
May this post be indexed by spiders, and archived for all to see as my Internet epitaph.
I recently purchased an 8-way Serial ATA raid card from 3Ware, with 8 160GB serial ATA hard disks. I have this habit of recording things like the Tour de France and Giro d'Italia and storing them on my server to watch while on the trainer in the winter time. Anyhoo, it's only a couple of months old (bought it right before this year's Tour), but it seems rock solid so far. 1120GB or so total space. I can't afford a backup solution that size, so I'm really just wingin' it - but it's still safer than JBOD. Total cost was in the $1300 ballpark, which isn't bad considering it is shared among 3 houses in my neighborhood.
I've been too long away from real programming to even guess if a beast could be made, so I'll post as an AC to mask my real identity from the flames.
I'd like a JBOD array of varying hard drive sizes, in a hot swappable enclosure. I'd like a parity drive. I'd like to be able to add a new disc until the rack of (choose your size) is full. The parity drive can "float" to the largest disk, with a hot-spare the second largest.
Here's the fun part: When I'm full, I want to be able to pop the smallest drive out and put in a larger capacity drive in its place. Then have it regenerate the "lost" files from the parity to the hot spare, set the new drive as parity, and set the old parity as the hot swap.
Why? Media service: DVDs particularly. I'm approaching the 400 disc limit on my jukebox and I'd like to put 'em all on HD. Except I'm too cheap to go out and buy n Hard drives everytime I want to upgrade. I want to get a couple of 250s this year, maybe some 320s next, and some 400s or 500s later when there's a really good rebate on them. Dynamic Capacity baby.
An even better deal than the XRaid. You get 12 SATA drives in 2U, dual Ultra320 SCSI or 2GB FC, 100mbit management port, built in webserver, SNMP mgmt, powered by a 600MHz Xscale CPU. Totally rocks.
You can score a 12x300GB unit for 10k, less if you omit FC or get multiple units (under 8k). Combine with a Relion/Altus head end, and you got some serious shit right there.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
...I think I love you. You hold the serial ATA cables to my heart. :-)
They're supposed to come out with their SATA line of powervaults that will be considerably cheaper, while simultaneously doubling their storage density.
They're heading that way already... they are pushing SATA hot swap in the rackmount servers and the NAS devices.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I just bought one of these for my raid fileserv.
http://www.aquilatech.co.nz/index2.htm
Nice,cheap (price is in NZ pesos), reasonably sized and holds 16 drives. Tho I do reccomend rounded cables or it gets a little tight.
P2's with external usb1.1 storage, going through an ISA USB card, by the sounds of it.
Har har! As if that actually helps or the controller manufacturers themselves don't do it with CPU that actually slower than the host. The only thing that's important is the the XOR's occur within one rev of the disks so that you don't drop a rev on your RMW. Plenty of time for that.
Fact is that there's little factual basis for the claim that hardware RAID is better. It all boils down to what solutions are most reliable and my experience is that all the low cost hardware RAID controllers are crap.
Use cheap controllers, software RAID 0, and rsync.
I'm in the middle of doing this myself... I'm saving the money to buy the drives I need. I've already got the server and array below.
;-)
2x Sun Ultra 10 desktop machines (360mhz / 512mb / 2x 18gb drive (hot-pluggable drives)) @ 150.00/ea (EBay)
2x 3' HVD cables @ 28.00/ea
2x X6541A Sun Dual Differential Ultra/Wide SCSI @ 100.00/ea (EBay)
1x Sun StorEdge A1000 storage array @ 120.00 (EBay)
10x Sun Ultra2 SCSI Drive Sleds @ 58.00 (EBay)
7x Seagate - ST1181677LCV 188gb Ultra2 SCSI drives @ 550.00/ea (PriceWatch)
Total for 1,128gb of Raid-5 storage: $4584.00
The trick is, with this setup you will have two machines with redundant access to the drives and data in the array. The Ultra10 is enough to handle any home use I can think of, and paired with Solaris 9 or even Linux will be blazingly fast. I just think that it's more expensive than any comparable SATA setup... great for us Sparc lovers tho!
I'm sick and tired of all these weenies, be it from the enterprise or from their living room whining and complaining about storage and RAID and how do I do this, how do I do that.
/dev/hda and another little bad block around GB 310 on /dev/hdc will mean your RAID5 array is screwed.
Here's the scoop, or poop, or whatever.
Buy a case, buy a systemboard with X number of connectors. Connect all the drives, format them as one big partition each.
Buy a little via dinky dude to be a netboot server, do root NFS or whatever (that way no OS partitions no your storage box.)
Now, buy a second one storage node.
You have sitting in front of you, 2 boxes, each with 4, 6 8 or whatever 400GB Hitachi drives.
DON'T! do raid! You're talking commodity IDE, chances are that one little bad block around GB 3 on
Mirror each disk onto another disk on the second machine.
Even if you are carrying your case to a friends house and drop it, chances are, if the drives aren't raided, you'll at least be able to get some/most of the data off.
Use a filesystem with distributed metadata (reiser and XFS if I'm not mistaken)
I guarantee you will have a catastrophic failure with RAID when using cheap IDE disks.
My school asked for me to create just a solution. Here's what I ended up with:
* 4U Enlight Case.
* 2 5-drive SuperMicro Hot Swap removable Drive cages. (SATA)
* 3Ware 12 port 8506.
* Supermicro Dual Xeon Motherboard.
* 2 Xeon 2.4Gig Hyperthreading Proccessors.
* 10 250 Gig SATA Harddrives.
The 3Ware card has a limitation of 2 Terabytes for a single volume, so we used a 9-Drive Raid 5 with 1 hot spare to make our large drive.
We used Debian Sarge, and BackupPC to backup our school's servers. We can backup EVERYTHIHNG now.
Oh, and this solution cost us less than half of the pre-designed solutions. The school has been very happy with it indeed.
Forget about finding a case ingenious enough to store large numbers of hard drives unless you live in Korea. Supposedly the rest of us can get $50 of plexiglass and a Dremel to grind out a custom case for large hard drive arrays but who knows what the static is going to be.
Also, hard drives made after 2002, the ones made in the new Shenzen plants, are only lasting a year for me before they start having problems. You're going to have serious data loss if you don't back everything up on removable media so why do you want to have everything on hard drives again?
I suggest you look at Lian-Li's PC-V2000 and up line. Both their PC-V2000 and their PC-V2100 have 7 5.25" bays and 12 3.5" bays. I also believe Lian-Li sells hard drive conversion bays. I'm not sure how they work though.
Linkage:
PC-V2000
PC-V2100
Lian-Li Homepage
Remember that some manufacturers offer better warranties than ithers (ie Seagate's is now 5 years).
Also, remember that some drives nowdays don't allow for a 24x7 duty cycle. Given that the SMART diagnistics in the drives can tell quite a bit to the person examining your warranty return, don't try to 'cheap' your way through and then claim on warranty.
I was looking to this solution for the same problem. I think it can be very usefull to transfer from 1 server to another a lot of data by just switching the cable. Another possibility
"Use cases are fairy tales..." I. S. 2005
Or, if you want really durable read-only storage (i.e. lasting a few hundred years without maintenance), you could use the little 1x1 LEGO blocks as bits.
Therefore, a mere eight-by-eight city block area could store a full 1 terabyte of LEGO-ROM, with no worrying about DVD rot or head crashes (although access speeds would leave something to be desired).
>;k
I can't believe no one has mentioned petabox yet. They cite as a benefit:
* Inexpensive storage
Granted it may be a little more than you had in mind...
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
Real Mean(tm) use this, the StorageTek Streamline. It will take 300 000 carts. At 300 GB per cart, that's 90 Petabyte. Lets see.. That's 90 000 TB, or 90 000 000 GB, or 450 000 000 000 pornographic images.
This company offers a variety of external storage solutions. Some use a variety of RAID configurations and interface through firewire and USB.
http://www.kanotechnologies.com/
This solution looks very interesting to me.
http://www.areca.us/IDERAID.htm
It takes up 3 external 5.25" bays and allows you to connect 5 3.5" drives. It provides expandable RAID 5, all internally with it's hardware and simply looks like an ATA or SATA device to the computer.
Has anyone here actually used one?
kiwi
--
System Architecture
Toshiba TMPR4927ATB 200MHz 64-bit RISC processor
64MB on-board cache memory with ECC protection
Areca 5 channels IDE controller (ARC600-66) with enhanced H/W XOR engine
NVRAM for RAID configuration & transaction log
Write-through or write-back cache support
Firmware in Flash ROM for easy upgrades
RAID Features
RAID level 0, 1 (0+1), 3, 5 and JBOD
Multiple RAID selection
Array roaming
Online RAID level/ stripe size migration
Online RAID capacity expansion and RAID level migration simultaneously
Automatically and transparently rebuilds hot spare drives
Hot swap new drives without taking the system down
Instant availability and background initialization
Automatic drive insertion / removal detection and rebuilding
Disk Bus Interface
Ultra ATA/133 compatible
5 channels, operating in parallel
5 hot-swap drive trays
48-bit LBA support allows disk exceeding 137GB
Staggering the Spin-Up of Individual Disk to Solve the Power-on Surge
Host Bus Interface
ARC-5010
Dual ATA interface-Ultra ATA/133 & Serial ATA 1.0
Ultra ATA/133 compatible Transfer rate up to 133MB/sec
Serial ATA 1.0 - 1.5Gbps(150 MB/sec)
ARC-6010
Ultra 160-Wide LVD SCSI; Transfer rate up to 160MB/sec
Tagged Command Queuing
Concurrent I/O commands
Um... ever consider the mind-bogglingly simple solution of:
ls -R> ~/dvd.index/<disc_label> for each dvd
grep "<whatever_youre_looking_for>" ~/dvd.index/*
Linux software raid is easier to configure and it is easier to fix bad drives. Plus its cheaper.
The trick is to only ever put one IDE device per channel. Which means you need extra PCI ide controlers. SATA works great too.
If you're archiving your photos, music, and movies you don't need 130Mb/s 30Mb/s is just fine.
Also, any design that requires your disk to be fast, is a bad one. Do you think your Google queries are waiting for a disk seek? Well, they aren't.
-SA
If you don't need to impress your artist friends with a cool aluminum case for your RAID array, you could always get an external RAID subsystem from Promise Tech. It costs around $3500 for the 15 drive model, but there are 8 drive($2200) and 4($1200) drive versions available too.
You would need to use a SCSI adapter on your computer, but if using RAID 5, would loose only 1 drive to redundancy. It can rebuild lost drives on the fly and has redundant and hot swappable power supplies and fans. In a couple of years as the drives become less expensive, you can replace them for more capacity. Right now a 3.5TB system would run around $7000 and would survive drive failure without data loss.
I have a Western Digital HD with 250 Gigs of space and an 8 Meg Buffer, the Caviar Edition, quite nice. But what's all this talk about storage? I have 4.35 GB on my drive, a total of about 2% disk usage. What a waste, but it was bundled with the PC. Someone out there want to trade me a Western Digital Raptor(36 gig, 10k RPM) for it? I could use the small storage, high speed drive for my own need: Gaming!
if your going to need alot of storage.. just pay for it.. call lsi or emc.
I was hooked. I would go to SAMs and purchase the CDs by the crate (60 blanks with cases). I used to frequent the discussion forums where people talked about how many coasters their burner would put out. It didn't take long to realize that most of them had hosed windows installs and that the OS simply couldn't keep up with the 2X writing speed.
I'm guessing I purchased the drive in mid to late 1998. I still have most of the CDs I created - they're kept in the spare bedroom (kept in the mid 80s during the day - in Florida) in Case Logic soft cases. A quick glance estimates over 2000 CDRs.
I have from time to time gone back and pulled data off of those CDs. Heck, one of the first CDs I wrote, NT 4 workstation, was installed on a test machine just this week.
I have had a few CDs fail. Most of the failed discs were the pure silver ones that look like a few microns of foil on the surface that simply flaked off. Those were cheap CDs that people gave me. My disc of choice was Imation, they were thick on the foil and survived. If I have an attrition rate as high as 0.5% I would be amazed. To this date I have yet to bump into a single CD I made from the late 90s that hasn't survived. Many of them lived years in my car in the Florida sun getting to around 110 fahrenheit daily for a month or two.
So, in the late 90s it was mode to blame the burner for the coasters. Now it seems everyone wants to blame the CDs for failing. Not all CDRs are made the same. Those $5 per 100 spindles just weren't worth the hassle.
I still buy Imation discs, now in spindles, and the quality isn't as high as it used to be. Even so, I have confidence in keeping my data on them.
8x 250gb ($169ea) = $1352
pci-x 8ch sata raid = $202
2.0T (or 1.0T mirrored) for $1554
say about a grand for a nice 4U rackmount case and mobo with plenty of pci-x slots and redundant psu's.
add another controller and 8 more drves as long as you have free pci-x slots and space for drives.
terabytes aren't expensive anymore
bite my glorious golden ass.
Just as elegant as the big guys, but with all the freedom of DIY:
e ws20044101001
http://www.cidesign.com/con_news_index.asp?file=n
I've used CiDesign's cases for years at the company I work for. You can't really beat their 3U chassis that can technically support up to 4TB of space. I personally like to settle with 3TB via SATA, and swap out one backplane for a SCSI version for SCSI system drives. Their flexibility is amazing and you can make it as cheap as you want or as expensive as needed for all the redundancy you require. They are also one of the few manufacturers that support 3ware's Multi-Lane Connectors used on their 9000 series RAID controllers. Hands down the best chassis I have ever used that comes completely cabled and with all of the accessories you need.
Aberdeen has some nice rackmount servers, including the TeraStorus box that holds 24 SATA drives and a server. You can pack a whopping 6TB of storage in one simple box. Use their configurator and choose what you want. If you need custom built stuff, give them a call.
BTW, their 5 year warranty kicks ass.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
LOADING...
READY.
RUN
15 drives, SATA.... Hitatchi 400 GB drives and iSCSI out the back. Hardware RAID! Who could ask for anything more?
___Abuse of power comes as no surprise___
That's a lot of pr0n!
That's the last time I run code posted in somebody's sig...
So for that 50 TiB total, you need 50/1.4 = 36 systems. 36 systems * 8 drives = 288 SATA drives spinning. How often do you have to replace one? I'm just wondering as I have had 4 x 200 GB drives in RAID 5 in my personal system for just under a year now and I've already had to replace one. Didn't lose anything, and it was under warranty, but in a month, I'll be out of WD's crappy one-year warranty and I'll have to start buying drives as they fail to keep my data.
Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).
What /.er has 50 CDs? I have hundreds of audio CDs... probably 50 software CDs, and probably 200 data CDs of random crap.
I mod down pyramid schemes in sigs.
This is a firewire raid enclosure selling for... (drum roll...) $0.99. I'm getting a lot of $225s for 250 GB internal HDDs on Froogle... ok teh cheapest I found so far is $180 - quality (at least in re data corruption) shouldn't matter tooo much with a RAID-1 configuration. So that's liek $360!1! Not bad - if you really want that much pr0n.
Get some cheap ass 250 gig drives.
Put them in a cheap ass USB2 drive enclosure.
buy a 8 port usb2 hub.
problem solved.
For backup and nearline storage, thats the best way.
Aberdeen sells their scalable NAS system that holds 3TB per 2U unit. It's expandable up to 5 units per port (15TB) in SCSI mode or ten units per port (30TB) in Fiber Channel mode. They also sell a massive backup storage server that holds up to 6GB per unit in 5 rack units.
we've done this with 8TB systems.
yes, you have to replace drives. we have to replace them on our clusters all the time.
there's a reason hot-swap RAID5 exists. there's a reason RAID6 was invented on top of that.
drives fail. warranties exist. can't do much about it.
For some weeks, I've been thinking on an idea: building a robotic cabinet with a small computer (say a fanless Via Eden motherboard) controlling a robotic changer manipulating hundreds of CD/DVDs in small slots. These CD/DVDs feed into a CD/DVD drive (maybe 2) hooked upto the computer by USB/firewire/SATA . And the computer is hooked up to your network.
Now the advantages of this idea:
1. The cabinet is really a storage server that continually monitoring the "health" of these hundreds of disks. i.e. It reads all disks on a regular basis, even those that no user has requested recently. When it finds a disk reaching a boundary condition (read errors on some sectors), it automatically replicates it on one of several blank CD/DVD that have also been inserted in the cabinet. This sort of active intervention addresses disk bit-rot in a cost effective manner - basically the cost of electricity and blank disks.
2. Since this device has an ethernet connection, it can emulate remote drives, possibly hundreds of remote drive at a time. Or more reasonably, virtual logical combinations of the contents of many drives can be represented as a single drive, or under virtual folders. It would also cache frequently requested optical disk data on the hard disk.
3. It can act as a local search appliance, actively indexing the contents of these disks, and storing the index on hard disk. This last thing is a big win for me - I often get things like "Java developers journal - all volumes on one CD". What's the point in having the CD if I can't easily find relevant content when I actually need it? This could be used in conjunction with a special key combo (say, Windows+F) to bring up the search screen.
So as I said, I've been thinking on this idea, bought some parts, etc. - lets see where it heads.
Almost exactly what I want to do (I'll RAID 1 the 2 RAID 5 arrays and take the spare set, on removable carts, to the safety deposit box).
Yes I do have (with the missus) enough CDs and DVDs to make this desirable. Do the math on replacement, and this is fairly cheap insurance.
Here is the article: http://www.finnie.org/terabyte/
Awesome!
Not going to read the replies, but the Coolermaster Stacker has 11 5.25" drive bays. The stacker comes with one 4 in 3 converter, which, when placed in 3 of the 5.25" bays... will hold 4 3.5" drives, and a 120mm fan. If you bought 2 more of these, you could have a total of 12 drives. 250 Gigs x 12 = 3 Terabytes. I believe Hitachi? has 400 gig drives out, so 12x400 gigs = 4.8 terabytes... and you'll still have room for 1 optical drive (2 if you don't want a floppy)
Every few days, it seems like. Maybe every two weeks, actually.
It's not so bad, though I'm sure it'll be something we look back and laugh at in the future when it's all in RAM or Flashcards or something that almost never fails.
IMPORTANT: we made a root-cron that immediately shuts down the computer if one drive fails, so that it doesn't put a bigger load on the other 7 drives, and protects against the risk of more than one drive going down on the same RAID.
But then you just pop in a new drive, run the 3WARE rebuild at boot, and you're back in action.
what do you want? Just saying raid can be very vague. Raid can range from no redundancy of data, or quite good redundancy.
that being said---i hope you're talking business needs here--a system with ten 250 GB drives is some serious storage space--not to mention a serious power bill
drives dont take up a ton individually, but ten of them will take up a good amount of juice. you may need very high end or redundant PS too--also, if i'm not mistaken, SATA will use less power than parallel drives--something to consider.
if you have a wad of cash just lying around, and you're wanting to buy "far more storage space than you will expect to need" then you are truely wasting your money. i'd just get a bit more than what you will expect to need within a couple years time, and then just rebuild the the thing a few years later when you actually need more space. the increase in storage space you will get a couple years from now will blow away what you currently can get. Just something to consiter.
On second thought, those warez servers on a fat pipe can fil up fast--ya may as well be prepared.
Troll, Troll, go away and flame again some other day
If you are worried about CD rot, check these out. Mam-A standard CD-Rs. Or google Mam-A CD-Rs
can we please stop having the same discussion again and again...2 53210
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/07/05/2
The only problem is that 3Ware cards (the ones with more then 2 drive support) require 64-bit PCI slots.
So, you'll looking at needing a board with 64-Bit pci slots which aren't the easiest to find, and they are expensive.
BUT. The 3Ware cards are cheap. In fact, you can skip the Serial ATA stuff, and go with cheaper IDE ATA drives. 3Ware makes an 8-drive IDE cable raid card that you can get for $360. It will do most raid configurations including RAID 5. It's sweet! Of course, the SATA stuff is a lot cheaper now, so you'll pay only probably $20 more per drive and the controller is about $100 more.
Hook up eight 250GB drives, pay $1200 for the drives, and get 1750 GB of usable space that's fault tolerant. Sure, you could go with one of those Apple server jobs, and pay $0.69 per Gigabyte instead of $2.90. SATA configuration for the same storage would be around $0.79 per Gigabyte. Add in the rest of the stuff, like the PC/board, controller, and case, you're looking at $1700 for a total system.
Expandability? You can put up to four 3Ware cards in a single system.
It might be loud but it's a LOT of space! =)
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
They have a rack mountable system that takes up to 24 disks in a 5U space. Up to 3.2 TB of space. More when they start kicking out systems with 400 GB disks.
IANAL... But I play one on
Your problem is that you have 200gb drives.
At work we bought something like 70 200gb drives. The first batches were maxtor. We ended up with about a 20% failure rate within a month on those, so changed over to WD. The failure rate went up to 25% within a month with those.
After about 9 months we're still losing WD drives, but not maxtors anymore.
With 120, 160 and 250 drive we see very minimal failures. The 300's haven't been around long enough for me to comment on those. Suffice it to say NOTHING was as bad as the 200's.
Backups? Well, I was already striped and mirrored, but with disk space so far outstripping my data needs, I could also easily afford to do intelligent backups of just important data to other machines, even offsite. Life was good.
Alas, then I discovered digital video. In an instant, I went from viewing 250GB as unnecessarily huge, to barely big enough comfortably to edit one full-length movie. I'm not talking MPEG here -- when you're heavy into editing, you want to use full-size, uncompressed video, so each minute of video chews up the disk like it was going out of style.
This leaves me once again in backup hell. Do you know what digital video people use mainly to backup? Mini-DV tapes, pumping the video right back out to magnetic tape. This takes a while, to say the least, and also helps wear out the tape transport on your probably-much-more-expensive-than-a-250GB-HD digital video camera.
People into digital video see the cutting edge of where backup problems are headed. They see that the time required to just pump the data off the disk is becoming prohibitive. If disk transfer speeds don't suffer a quantum improvement soon, disks will become, from the perspective of full backups anyway, essentially like serial devices, were you have to focus on restricting access to the device because it's just so slow.
Just a word of warning, the 3ware 9000 series are a little problematic in linux right now. Apparently a driver is going to go in 2.6.8. Until this is stable, you're probably better off with a 7500 or 8500 series card. (I built a ~1TB raid server for work with a 3ware 7506 and it worked like a charm, and a coworker built a home fileserver with an 8000 series sata card with good success.)
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
I'll be out of WD's crappy one-year warranty and I'll have to start buying drives as they fail to keep my data.
Umm.. WD sells drives with better than one year warranties.
Brand loyalty amongst HD manufacturers is rather stupid. They all make high quality drives and they all make junk.
Don't you know that you've made it easy for the men in the white van outside? Now all they have to do is watch the LEDs through the window and see that you've been downloading terrabytes of pr0n to your fileserver!
Instead of looking at a semi-commodity 1TB solution - which is a PITA for needing an industrial strength case, power supply, drive controller card and HVAC, you need to look at the other end:
.8TB.
Two or three fairly normal PCs with STANDARD drive controllers, PSUs and HVAC.
Look, we're talking file servers here. 128MB RAM is gobs if you aren't running any other service on 'em. Pick and OS, any OS: 2000 gets you dfs, *nix gives you NFS. Both give you a homogenous networked file system.
So...
Standard case/PSU/cheapo CPU (Athlon mobile or Via or P3, for lower power consumption)/RAM - That's $250, maybe. Add another $20 for a gigabit NIC or two per machine.
4x 200GB drives @ $110 apiece (pricewatch shows $96 as the low price, but I'll go $110 for a little wiggle room)
So... something around $700 gets you
Buy three machines. $2100 gets you tons of storage and scads of redundancy no matter how you look at it.
This is the philosophy I use in setting up my file servers (now serving 6.5TB!). Over time I've added 3ware cards, upgraded PSUs and added gobs of RAM, but my basic starting point is a very modestly-appointed system.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
If you're looking to do it on the cheap and uptime/mega-performance are not worth a truck load of money to you, have a look at what works well for me:
/usr on the array). You can always back up your root partition (all 100MB of it) to the array.
1 x PC-6077 Lian-li case (3 drives)
3 x EX-23 Lian-li 3.5" adaptor (9 more)
3 x Cheap ($30) SI3114 based SATA cards (12 ports)
11x Your fav 250GB SATA hard drive
1 x Your fav 40GB hard drive
1 x Antec 550w quiet power supply
I set up 2 5-disk RAID5 arrays and used them as PVs in a LVM volume group. I use the remaining 250GB disk as a floating hot-spare (it can move to either array as needed) and monitor with mdadm. Use the 40GB as a system drive, assuming that you're not going to do much more than boot off of it (/var
Use 256k for the stripe size on the RAID5 and be sure to use large extents on the LVM (I recommend 256MB or 512MB) because even with 128MB extents, your maximum lv size is something like 2TB which you've just reached.
This case works well because it can be used without modification for a lot of the 3x5.25 -> 5x3.5 SATA hotswap converters out there, which don't like those little ridges upon which 5.25" components rest.
If you're power paranoid, I saw a neat little 500W dual redundant power supply that fits in an ATX case somewhere. You could do that or a UPS or both, but I think you will be better served by a decent UPS.
Lian-Li has a new version, the PC-7077 which can fit 15 drives using their converters or 18 drives using 3->5 converters. It has a lot of room to keep it cool.
Mine is a little noisy with 9 fans, but I am sending away for new silenx fans which should help out. They also have a 0db fanless 460W power supply available if that interests you. http://www.silenx.com.
Anyway the whole bundle of wax cost me in the neighbour hood of $1900. For 2TB with reasonable redundancy, that's not bad.
Hope that helps!
Seems those Hard Disk / RAID solutions are the best thing so far, but too pricey if it's for a SOHO. If it's for a business, it's just the perfect way to go.
As for me, since it's for personal data, I'll stick to CD. In fact, I'm now with DVD, and DualLayer DVD's are just around the corner, can't wait to switch again. Total Cost of all this switch? Not even a thousand bucks, including media and cd-rom drives and I have my terabyte of data. Not bad.
http://www.netcell.com/
These guys build some very sweet boxes, they have been at LFNW the last 2 years (that I know of). Take a look at 3.5T for $10k here at their site -- and no this isn't because they gave me a free hat.
bcl
Remember Lexington Green!
First -- bleh, I asked the same question two months ago.
Second -- As a result of rejection I did my research.
Third -- Read the specs on the 3Ware cards. 2TB/"RAID Drive" max, even with the 12 port drives.
Fourth, you can tone down the hardware here a bit, but this is the most economical hardware solution I got that fit my needs: *24x WD2500JD 250GB SATA 150 *1x WD600AB 69GB *1x Trinity GC-SL, S707 -OR- Tyan S5112G2NR P4 533/800 SATA RAID GbE LAN *1x SuperMicro SC833TB 3U 8xSATA, 550W *1x Intel P4 mPGA478 2.8Ghz 800MHz FSB 1MB Gagde *4x Corsair 1024MB DDC, PC2100, ECC, Un/registered *2x 3WARE RAID SATA 9500S 8PT *1x Plextor 52x32x52 CDRW PX-PREMIUM-BPS
For a total of three RAID 5 arrays at and 5TB total. Can expand more if necessary.
Drop the second card, drop the CPU spec, drop the RM amount, and you have a pretty good price.
Original price before going all out (dropped specs) was $3100. Price with the higher specs was $4000.
I built 6 of these and bought the SATA drives straight from the maufacturer at a huge discount.
If the 3Ware cards could support more than 2TB, I would have gone with 400GB drives.
We've played a bit with software firewire RAID, but we're a lot happier with our firewire hardware RAID systems. RAID 5 three-drive case, hot-swappable drives with auto-rebuild-on-the-fly (even if the host computer is down, though of course it should never have to be). Cost? Under $900 for the case. Or if you want a five-drive solution, I think it's around $1400, and for that you get a case that is connectible via USB2, FW800, or SATA, and can be used as a mini-SAN since it can be connected via FW800 and SATA to two different computers at the same time. Pretty sweet.
We're using ours on Linux machines, and despite the hassles of getting firewire up and running, once we finally did (after two weeks of work), it works a treat; not a single problem. And of course it works great with our Macs and PCs as well. No extra software needed, just plug and play.
The Apple XServe RAID is cheaper and probably better-built if you're going for ten drives, but if you're going for three to five, or adding slowly, the firewire RAID cases are really, really sweet.
Firewire Depot has them, fwdepot.com. And no, I don't work there, I'm just a very, very satisfied customer.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
Could you tell me where do you find good 250g SATA drives for $100 each, please?
"The number of Unix installations has grown to ten, with more expected." (Unix Programmer's Manual, 2nd ed.; june 1972)
i have some experience with this, please read:
I have built a number of 'cheap' arrays for A/V techs. High capacity, high performance SATA arrays are prefered.
The most Rescent system was a 11 device SATA with 250WD drives in RAID5, for (((11-1)*250)/1024)*1000 or 2.384TBytes. Originally I had decided to use a 3ware card for the RAID but changed my mind to a linux based box with 3xPromise 4 SATA device cards and Linux's own RAID5 using LVM. This 'should' provide hot-swap but that is not essential and is untested. Linux(LVM) labels each drive and keeps track of everything and allows easy array rebuilds on drive failure. Also, the system is a 64*66 Mhz PCI on a Single CPU Xeon, 512MB(256x2)registered. this provides 528MBytes/sec, and the array can give 400+ MBytes/second, easily passing the 125MB/seconds theoretically possible on Gigabit Ethernet.
In the end, the transfer rate accross the network is just over 100MBytes/second, and I believe that most of this is TCP/IP overhead. Also, standard smb was used to transfer data from the linux server(samba3.0)
I built a similar system about 3 weeks earlier, but used 160WD drives and a 3Ware card. The reason I chose Linux software this round was because the 3Ware card showed pretty weak transfer rates in Linux. This machine runs WindowsXP Pro(did not nead 2003 server's features) and Linux is a cheaper Yet comprable if not faster.
I have no Linux-vs-3Ware benchmarks, but I certainly believe that Linux's RAID is as good as 3Ware cards and is very much cheaper.
----
also, backup is EASIER in linux, you can mount a drive via NFS and do an incremental backup with tar+gzip, or you can set up rsync and backup on a regular basis, with linux and rsync you can have rsync run daily and have offsite storage also.
I'm not sure about the US but at least in europe, legally 1ko = 1000 bytes (and 1 Mo = 1000000 bytes, ...) since some european "directive".
As a side note, carrots are legally fruits (european directive again)
I'm facing the same problem and have done some research in this area. My solution so far is to take some decent case (my current favorite is a Evercase ECE4292), a cheap processor (AMD Duron), a cheap board (something under 40 Euro), 512 MByte RAM and a hardware RAID controller...
My choice for the controller is the Adaptec 2810SA - an 8-Port SATA Raidcontroller (around $600) which provides on really important feature (at least for me) - OCE; Online Capacity Extension. That means, that you can easily start with a 3 drive RAID-5 and the extend it as you need it by simply plugging more drives into the controller - using 250Gbyte drives you can scale it up to 1.75 Terrabyte.
if this is a high availability fileserver, and you lose a drive, it's down till you copy it back over. with raid, it doesn't matter: service isn't interrupted. horses for courses, mind...
Hey, I want something similar for my home setup. Not necessarily the same specs as the originator but still an affordable redundant fault-tolerant network attached storage device so that I can forget about backing anything up to DVD ever again. However, it just takes an "rm -rf /" (*) to totally ruin your day. Such a device would sure have to come with an inbuilt DAT drive for backing up the truely critical data, and tape cycling would still be required to be totally safe. It really depends how much you value your data. If it's not valuable enough to invest in such a device and do the tape backups then just use a USB harddrive, maybe a redundant second drive to be sure.
/s /q c:\" for the 95% of slashdotters who use Microsoft on a daily basis but swear they are elite Linux hackers. :-)
*: that's "rd
here's what I have done.
Search e-bay for a cheap server case
used old components (early Athlon, Geforce 2 etc) to build the server
For hdd I've used an old 60gig drive for Debian and then Raid 5 9 250 gig WD drives.
This gives me about 1.8TB of storage and decent redundancy for about £1,250
As many have said - you can get the same thing for less from other SATA raid vendors.
Secondly this storage does NOT perform as well. I have seen other similarly priced disk arrays get up to 30% better performance.
And as a matter of fact, that guy just needs 4 SATA disks and LVM.
www.petabox.org
With their disk array, when a disk fails you can't rebuild it online - you need to do it offline. Also, if one channel fails, the other can't take over, so that's another way to downtime.
If one cares about RAID and redundancy/availability, they shouldn't use Apple's product in the first place.
You want secure storage - what if your house burns down?
Buy your drives in pairs - each time the best price/performance ratio. When one gets full, back it up on to the second, put the backup in a safe deposit box in another state, and buy two more drives.
Sometimes the simplest way is the best way.
The antidote for misuse of freedom of speech is more freedom of speech.
-- Molly Ivins
We have just bougth 5 boxesh p?cPath =38&products_id=175
like this:
http://www.3ware.dk/catalog/product_info.p
put in 12, 250Gb SATA disks.
for about 55.000 danish korner. it is aporx: 8500 usd
for information about performacne look her
amigos23.diku.dk/disk/tmp.html
the result you want to look at is
dcgc-data
(hr=hardware raid, sr=software raid)
What rimes on recursion What rimes on recursion What rimes on recursion What rimes on recursion
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
If you whittled your collection down to stuff you paid for or obtained without violating the record companies rights you wouldn't need so damn much storage.
EMC or IBM $0.01/meg. (talking in the TB though).
i had a terrabyte once. When i was going to save my file, linux said "can't do chief. it's bigger than 2GB". Then i just thrown all the drives into the garbage can and now i'm happy with a 2GB HD since it's all i need.
Not correct:
With price/GB 3x cheaper than Dell (and even less vs. IBM, HP and Sun), and certified Linux+Windows compatibility, I'd say Xserve is a pretty interesting product.
For accurate information, check the source.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
Lets see.
;) We're talking a $1K-3K project.
I have an old Gateway 2000 tower cab that is capable of holding 8 3.5" drives, plus 3 5.25" bays. So a new mother board, beefier power supply, as many fans as I can pack in and I could get to 10 IDE/ATA drives (one 5.25" bay for CD-rom) with a total of 2.5 TB before RAID. Carve that into two 5 disks RAID 5 sets and I have a live 1 TB volume and then use system guardian for backup and have a 1 TB volume of offline back for when I mistakenly delete/overwrite the wrong things.
Several things I'm missing...
1) not sure the is a power supply to handle 10 drives plus the other stuff.
2) not sure I can get enough airflow to keep it cool.
3) not sure there is one RAID controller that can manage easier manager 5 disks into one RAID 5 set.
4) not sure I can route the seven IDE flat cables (1 to CD, 2 to single drives, 4 to two drives)
5) I know I don't have the $$$ to spend.
www.technoland.com
cheap hardware controlled raid chasis for scsi, ata, and sata to al sorts of buses (different ranges of scsi, and fiber)
Most drives and standards associated with storage media (filesystems, etc.) use the concept of sectors, which are 512 bytes. Moreover many file systems store and manipulate blocks of approximately the page size of the operating system using it, usually 4096 or 8192 bytes. It is good if these units can be represented exactly in kb, and that the size of the drives themselves are expressed in these multiples, just so that you can figure out exactly how many of these structures you can expect to fit on the media.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
And you paid upwards of $5000 for that pansy thing? You can that from Dell for $4500... and that's not even trying to find a better deal.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Promise Technologies makes some pretty good products along these lines. I have 4 of their UltraTrak SX8000 (8 drive ATA RAID, external) boxes. They halso have the UltraTrak RM15000 (15 drive SATA RAID, external) for under $4K. Definitely worth checking out.
n g. asp?productId=109&familyId=6
http://www.promise.com/product/product_detail_e
Combining a few standard ata/sata drives in raids (1 or 5) and then building a really big block device with lvm is nice too
quit buying shitty cds.
http://www.rackmountnet.com
:)
It looks like they now have 4U systems holding up to 24 drives. I bought a 4U that held 16 PATA drives last year, and it's worked fairly well.
It's amazing what a little googling can do.
Not even including the cost of housing the media, or the mechanisms for reading/writing, the cost alone is prohibitive --
You can't buy 1x1 bricks singly, and the cost of a green baseplate (from the LEGO store) is US$5. If you were to use plates for the reduced size, you get 16 1x1s in a US$5 pack, which has another 68 pieces you don't need ( )
The cheapest I can find pieces for are about US$0.06 per piece. We'll assume they'd give you the 15% discount for bulk orders, which would mean about US$68.75 per KB (7/8 populated, as per spec).
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
http://www.raid.com/ .. From about 3000.00 to 10,000 CAN. depending what you are looking for. I priced out 6TB for just over 5000.00 CAN.
The best/easiest solutions I have seen so far
The USGS can pull down 3-4 terabytes per day with a single 1-meter-resolution satellite. I believe they use firewire harddrives as 'floppies' but they have found (from long, bitter experience) that for long term massive storage the ONLY way to go is tape. You can read more about USGS here: http://www.usgs.gov/.
even though some sort of separate
and off site backup is needed,
i might suggest you do not depend
on manually mounted tapes.
you will turn into a tape
tenderer quickly and the
issue of time needed to do
the job will reduce the
frequency you use them.
system to system backup is
still my favorite and in the
Windows world, Ghost works.
Wow, You must get much better pricing! I built the following a month ago: 329 -- SuperMicro X5DPA-GG motherboard 957 -- SuperMicro SC933T-R60 Case 1,045 -- 2 x 3ware 8506 SATA Raid Controllers 1,901 -- 12 x 200 GB SATA-150 drives 1,299 -- 4 x 1 GB Memory 1,501 -- 2x Xeon 3.2 GHz (533 MHz) 1 MB Cache So, just over $7,000 for 2.34 Terabytes (raw, that is). But that for everything, from the 1 MB cache on the processors to it's dual gig ethernet, dual hot swap redundant power supplies, and all hot swap drives (heck, all the fans are hot swap too, it that matters...) Did I mention the beautiful "beige noise" it layers over the disturbing racket of the rest of our server room...a true bonus.
>For accurate information, check the source.
s /xserve/
i nfo/macosx/ 20768&mode=feedback&vid=All
c _FS4500_hard_drive_ array/4014-3033_9-30801460.html?tag=pl&q=Adaptec%2 C+Inc.s upport/techspecs .jsp?sess=no&language=English+US&prodkey=FS4500&ca t=%2FProduct%2FFS4500
Screw the source.
"Unfortunately, the Xserve lacks redundant fans or power supplies, and it lets you create redundant hard drives only via the feature-poor and unreliable software-RAID implementation included in Apple's Disk Utility. When we tested our Xserve with two 60GB drives formatted as a mirrored array, Disk Utility didn't let us mirror a drive on which we already had data, forcing us to erase all drives in the RAID set and start over. (Our advice is to decide on your setup before you begin to configure your server.) "
Source:
http://www.macworld.com/2002/11/review
(True, 2002 but I also heard that from a customer three months ago)
"Despite rebuilding my 10.2-created RAID from the command-line (which took 5.5 hours for 130GB of data on a 2x250GB drive!), I was still getting flaky performance, out-of-sync errors and no rebuild option under 10.3.4"
Source:
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/more
(A July 2004 post).
Also, I've seen it in action and it had mediocre performance with stability problems similar to what they say on the Web.
>With price/GB 3x cheaper than Dell (and even less vs. IBM, HP and Sun), and certified Linux+Windows compatibility, I'd say Xserve is a pretty interesting product.
Gezuz, cheaper than Dell's what?
This is a mid-end department-level FC-SATA disk array!
What EMC (Dell), IBM, HP and Sun sell are real enterprise disk arrays for building SANs.
It's a completely different class of products.
Well, perhaps you don't have experience with storage...
The only thing interesting about this product is that Apple's marketing fooled people into believing this is some kind of EMC killer.
Better compare it with Adaptec FS4500 (starts at $6K without the disks, has active-active controllers (unlike Apple), up to 1GB cache per controller (Apple's got up to 512MB I think)) and RAID software probably works.
Source:
Price:
http://shopper.cnet.com/Adapte
Specs:
http://www.adaptec.com/worldwide/
Apple has no experience with enterprise storage (which is obvious from the continous RAID software problems) and that's it.
It's ludicrous to buy storage from such company.
If you have 200 DVDs ( which seems like a lot to me) and you have a 10%/year rot rate, then you are losing about 20/year. Since nearly any DVD/CD can be had for about $15, you are losing about $300/year worth of product. As far as I can tell, all the solutions listed will cost in excess of $1000 and require a lot of time and work. It seems easier to try to minimize the loss by storing your media in a climate controlled area and repurchase anything that goes bad. Don't forget that even if you get a good RAIDx TB storage system, it won't last forever. Those hard drives and other hardware will crap out in a few years and need to be continually upgraded. You will also likely not replace everything that goes bad either. If you own 200 DVDs I suspect that if some died you would not spend a dime to replace them. That copy of Gigli that you got for Xmas from your aunt last year may not need backing up.