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SATA RAID Enclosure w/ Temperature Monitoring?

Posted by Cliff on from the cool-storage-is-happy-storage dept.

vanyel asks: "Yesterday, my external USB 2.0 drive enclosure finished cooking a 3/4 full 200G drive after its fan quit working who knows how long ago. In the time honored tradition of closing the barn door *after* the horse has wandered away, I'm accelerating my quest for a RAID solution. In particular, I want something that will support 4 SATA drives and has temperature monitoring that doesn't require a particular vendor's RAID card or Windows. Better yet, is there a RAID-5 NAS that isn't in the $4-5000USD price range. Anyone with a better barn door to close this problem with?"

13 of 91 comments (clear)

  1. Use SMART? by crow · · Score: 4, Informative

    At least with ATA drives, you can usually use smartd to monitor your drives. This includes temperature and various failure indicators. Usually when a drive fails, there is plenty of warning from small failures that the drive recovers from. When you run smartd, you can receive these warnings.

    1. Re:Use SMART? by Sepper · · Score: 2, Informative

      I second that. You can have Smart Run a script when things fails, like Mailing the details of the failiure and then turning off the computer.

      For other computer parts lsensor might do the trick.
      For exemple: http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Monitor_your_hard_dis k(s)_with_smartmontools

      if it's an external device, the best thing would be to get a controlable UPS And turn off (again with a small script)

      Just think RAID, UPS, smart monitors and deamons and with a bit of imagination, you can come up with a soultion.

      --
      I live in Soviet Canuckistan you insensitive clod!
    2. Re:Use SMART? by isorox · · Score: 2, Informative

      Every week would have done. Simply have a daily cron job that greps you logs for fatal messages and email them to you.

    3. Re:Use SMART? by endx7 · · Score: 2, Informative

      And best of all, SMART works with not just ATA, but SATA too, which is what asker seems to be asking for.

    4. Re:Use SMART? by hackstraw · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Okay, so in order to figure out if my drive is going south I need to check the event log every day? WTF?

      Yes you do. Its no big deal at least for operating systems that log in plaintext (I don't know about windows). What I do is nightly grep for unusual stuff and I take 30seconds to a minute reviewing it for all of my systems and I admin about a hundred, so one machine should take about 5 seconds or so a day. That is much easier than trying to recreate 250 Gigs of data from a dead drive. Right?

    5. Re:Use SMART? by raxhonp · · Score: 2, Informative

      And then use hddtemp to ease monitoring your drives.

  2. Avoid RAID5 by photon317 · · Score: 2, Interesting


    There is really only one good reason to ever use RAID5, and that is that you're too tight on money to be able to afford to RAID1 (Mirror) the storage you need (If you need 400G of space, RAID1 is gonna cost you 800G of storage, whereas RAID5 might only cost you 500G of storage). RAID1 is both faster (For writes and especially reads) and more resilient than RAID5. Assuming you can afford it (and storage itself is pretty cheap today, especially if you don't get a fancy RAID5 controller), just go with RAID1.

    If you want really nice performance and you're buying 4+ drives, do RAID1+0 - mirror the drives up in pairs (where the pairs are as diverse as your setup allows, seperate controllers and/or chassis and/or power, etc...), then stripe the data volume on top of the sets of mirror-pairs.

    --
    11*43+456^2
    1. Re:Avoid RAID5 by TheGratefulNet · · Score: 2, Informative

      true.

      no array is ever completely fault tolerant.

      you STILL need backups.

      but raid helps get you buy during the 3am disk failure and you don't want to drive 50miles to replace a failed disk.

      in the AM, when you get to work, THEN you replace it.

      raid is not subs. for backups. but it helps get you thru the single spindle failures.

      its better than NOT having it.

      --

      --
      "It is now safe to switch off your computer."
    2. Re:Avoid RAID5 by secret_squirrel_99 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Until you have two drives fail. Then, you're fucked. Don't act like that never happens, because it does. I've had it happen, as I'm sure others have. No more RAID5 for me. . .

      Thats what hot spares are for. Even if you aren't monitoring your arrays.. you are aren't you? One global hot spare per enclosure and you need 3 failed drives before you loose data.

      --
      If privacy had a tombstone it would read "We did it for your own good" . -- John Twelve Hawks
    3. Re:Avoid RAID5 by hackstraw · · Score: 2, Insightful

      no array is ever completely fault tolerant.

      you STILL need backups.

      I'm not sure what the target use is, but it seems like its personal, and being that the previous external drive was only USB, performance does not seem to be a concern.

      With that in mind, I would suggest poor man's RAID1 over real RAID1. By that I mean buy two disks and cron a rsync command every night. This would take care of backups and redundancy, although its not realtime, so a disk failure after a disk write but before the rsync would loose your data, but that is very unlikely and if something is that important, extra precautions should be made. In my opinion, real RAIDx is only necessary if uptime is of importance. For personal use, I would guess that a quick switching of disks or mounting another one and making a symlink is OK.

      In other words, I agree with the theory of RAID1, but RAID1 + a backup requires at least 3x the storage space. I was looking at getting two Lacie bigdisks (500Gigs) and do this mirroring on them, but after the one died at work, and a quick google search says that most all of the Lacie RAID0 disks rarely survive more than a year, I too am in the market for an enclosure. In looking at the Lacie enclosure, it doesn't take someone too long to figure out why they all fail. The airflow is from front to back and one harddrive is directly in back of the other, so the 2nd drive gets all the heat. Doh!

      I would really like for something like the Lacie bigdisk that was properly engineered. I would be comfortable with having about 500Gigs of space for a while.

  3. Supermicro has something that'll work by the_maddman · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Supermicro makes the SATA drive cages I use, they have an alarm on them if the fan quit, or if they overheat, and it's loud enough you'll do something about it just to shut it up. Take a look at http://www.supermicro.com/products/accessories/mob ilerack/CSE-M35S.cfm

    I got mine from http://www.newegg.com/ for around $150 when you get shipping and tax involved, and they work good.

  4. Typical Slashdot by bhima · · Score: 2
    Let me summarize all of these comments: No we Don't Know, Not Really.

    Which really disappoints me as I will soon run out of room in my PowerMac with my extra drive bracket.

    Is it just me or is Slashdot becoming exponentially more useless?

    --
    Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
  5. Why RAID 1+0 is safer than RAID 0+1 by adb · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Here's a clear and concise explanation, with pictures.

    With a striped pair of mirrors, a total failure happens only if both drives in one of the mirrors fail; there are two ways this can happen.

    With a mirrored pair of stripes, a total failure happens whenever any two drives in different stripes fail; there are four ways this can happen.

    In both cases, there are (4 2) = 6 pairs of drives that can fail. Given that two drives have failed, there's a 2/6 = 33% chance that the RAID 1+0 will fail, but a 4/6 = 67% chance that the RAID 0+1 will fail.