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Terabyte Storage Solutions?

Posted by Cliff on from the large-arrays-of-fat-disks dept.

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?"

3 of 574 comments (clear)

  1. LaCie Bigger Disk by sunilonline · · Score: 0, Redundant

    I know LaCie makes some 1 terabyte+ stuff. I think it's been mentioned on /. before.

  2. Promise by ttrafford · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Promise sells some really cheap.

  3. You're all smoking crack, it's not that hard by brak · · Score: 0, Redundant

    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.

    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 /dev/hda and another little bad block around GB 310 on /dev/hdc will mean your RAID5 array is screwed.

    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.