Turnkey Linux RAID Solutions?

Total-Gig-Age asks: "I want to buy an expandable RAID system for home storage of large media files (music, film, and photo). I'm absolutely unwilling to rely on optical discs (bit rot, not always online) and un-RAID-ed hard drives (unsafe: if it fails, you're screwed). The thing is, I don't have time to shop for and configure a RAID system myself, and I want a turnkey solution that will just work out of the box. I'm aware of Apple's XServe, but $6000 for 1 TB is just too expensive. What are my best options if I want to buy an open source system that I can maintain and upgrade if need be? Any recommendations on a full set of components, so that I don't have to spend a week shopping? Trustworthy online companies? Can I trust a local store to do it for me? Is it better to keep the server as a separate machine? Finally, how much should I expect to spend if I want something that doesn't suck (for 1TB say)? I can find plenty of info on how to set up RAID on the Internet, but I just want to be told what to buy so I can get on with other things, even though I could probably handle setting the whole thing up myself if I had to."

Comments

Build it.

[CsiDano]

Cheapest option is probably to build it yourself. There are plenty of resources to help you and lots of people too answer your questions. Besides then you have bragging rights for building it yourself!

Re:Build it.

[fm6]

Nice to hear that there are plenty of resources. You wouldn't happen to know what they are, would you?

Re:Build it.

[Anonymous Coward]

What part of "I don't have time to shop for and configure a RAID system myself, and I want a turnkey solution that will just work out of the box" are you having a problem with?

Re:Build it.

[CsiDano]

Well it's difficult to think of any complicated system or even simple systems that work out of the box without configuring them to your own needs (requires time). I thought suggesting a DIY was better than offering nothing constructive at all. Since cheap doesn't alway mean reliable, or require not effort to setup.

Re:Build it.

[CsiDano]

Decent place to start for linux RAID includes details for the level of RAID you want.
http://www.linuxdocs.org/HOWTOs/Software-RAID-HOWT O-4.html
Hardware forums if you need advice
http://forums.devhardware.com/
Even Toms Hardware offers help with Windows RAID. All you have to do is look for the help it's out there in forums and how to websites. I'm sure you can even find decent books on the subject.

Re:Build it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey you lazy douche bag why don't you get off your lazy ass and look. Good to see slashdot awarding +mods to douche bags that having nothing helpful to say. Of course their are resources you lazy ass clown

Re:Build it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering the original post EXPLICITLY listed "turnkey" as a requirement, DIY was out of the question no matter what you thought was a good idea or constructive. If you don't have an answer to the question as it is posted, don't reply. Why do you /.'ers not understand that?

Re:Build it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice to hear that there are plenty of resources. You wouldn't happen to know what they are, would you?

Try searching AskSlashdot. Someone seems to ask some aspect of the question of how to build a 1TB RAID home file server every few months.

Experiences w/ Software RAID 5 Under Linux?

Ideas for a Home Grown Network Attached Storage?

Terabyte Storage Solutions?

What is the Ideal Low-end NAS Solution?

Newegg.com

[Leroy_Brown242]

I have never been happier with an online retailer than I have been with NewEgg.com.

Re:Newegg.com

[fm6]

Offtopic. Plus their animated Slashdot adds are very irritating.

Re:Newegg.com

[MindStalker]

Never had these problems with NewEgg myself, but don't order from them very often as they don't take PO orders. Either way I buy almost everything from mwave.com simply because they have bent over backwards for me, several times when I screwed up the order, and we arn't a huge purchaser maybe 5 grand a year total.

Hell one time I accidently ordered too big of a heat sinks and bent a capacitor which fried the motherboard. They took it back for credit even after I told them the truth. (Of course don't expect such treatment I think I just got lucky on that one)

Re:Newegg.com

[Leroy_Brown242]

That's so odd, since I've ordered tons of stuff from them and never had an issue.

$6k/1TB too much?

[Triumph The Insult C]

nevermind the "if it's important, then $$ shouldn't matter" argument

is $6k just too much, or is 1TB just not enough disk space for $6k? in other words, if you could get 4TB for $6k, would would consider it?

Re:$6k/1TB too much?

[DShard]

Considering that a sata card with eight channels is roughly $500 and 6 $200 gig drives can be had for less than a grand I would say that for a home/small office $6k is to expensive for what you get. considering file/print services can be handled very well by the cheapest processor on the market, a total system can be had easily for half that with full support. 4TB is a different situation since you need a lot of io channels and I would think that, realistically, $6k is too cheap.

Re:$6k/1TB too much?

[Triumph The Insult C]

but he's looking for something that works out of the box

otoh, if he's ok building it himself, then $6k is a lot. but for something out of the box, perhaps not

Re:$6k/1TB too much?

[sxpert]

lessee...
8 port 3Ware 9500 controller : $500
400G Seagate sata disk: $350

400GB * 3 = 1.2TB

you we need 4 disks and one controller for 1.2TB of raid5

500 + 350*4 = $3400

add the motherboard and processor ($600), and you have a system for $4K

Re:$6k/1TB too much?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can build a 1.2TB SATA RAID 1+0 using external enclosures for about $2k. RAID 5 will cost you a little extra, but for 1TB it shouldn't be any more than $3k (if you buy 5400rpm drives - which i recommend, for heat reduction anyway - it may actually be closer to $2k). And this is considering buying a REAL hardware RAID card, not some frilly oh-lets-offset-just-the-XOR-operations-to-the-card -and-force-them-to-use-a-proprietary-driver crap.

You know why it costs more, right?

[beegle]

You want good quality, but you don't want to pay for it. Ummm, right.

Quality comes at a price. Everybody learns this eventually. With a DIY solution, the price is your time. You can make something really great if you're willing to burn a weekend or two on it.

If you're buying something, you can have "moderately expensive, stable, and really limited", "really cheap, but likely to fall apart or catch fire", or "really expensive and really flexible".

The other thing that you run into with a sommercial system is the difference between home and business requirements. For a business with a machine room, dust, humidity, and temperature are easy to control. A noisy unit is fine. Under your desk, temperature and dust build-up will be a problem, and the thing'll sound like a jet engine.

Re:You know why it costs more, right?

[gstoddart]

Quality comes at a price. Everybody learns this eventually. With a DIY solution, the price is your time. You can make something really great if you're willing to burn a weekend or two on it.

Well, many of us might have a weekend or two. Probably fewer of us have $6K for an xserve just laying about.

Yes, of course, there is a cost associated with your time. However unless someone is paying you for every minute of your day, you have access to your own time.

Promise UltraTrak SX4000

[Yonder Way]

I got a couple of Promise UltraTrak SX4000 4 Channel External RAID Enclosures at $WORK to evaluate and while they aren't fast enough for me to move a production Oracle server to, they are plenty fast for a home media server and are quite affordable.

Each enclosure presents itself as a SCSI drive. You can chain enclosures together and use LVM to make them available to one (or more) filesystem(s). Hardware RAID takes place within each enclosure, but not across them.

Mine were set up with four 300GB drives which, after RAID5 overhead, gave me 900GB of usable space per enclosure (I had two enclosures). You could easily use 400GB drives and have 1.2TB per enclosure if you wanted. I would think that total cost for the enclosure with 400GB disks would be around $2500 US.

Re:Promise UltraTrak SX4000

[kinema]

Seeing as the arrays present as SCSI drives would it be possible to do a software RAID 1 (striping) across multiple arrays providing one large faster array?

Re:Promise UltraTrak SX4000

[Yonder Way]

Yes, it is possible to do hardware RAID across them. But RAID 1 is not striping; it's mirroring. I think what you're after is RAID 0. I think that you can accomplish the same effect with LVM, though.

Re:Promise UltraTrak SX4000

[aminorex]

Take a generic low-end PC (say, sempron 2200, with a pc-chips or ecs motherboard, 128MB DDR -- it's all overkill at this point) in a tall, well-ventilated case with at least 300W power, for about $150, and add 4x 250GB IDE drives, for about $450. Run as raid 5 on a debian sarge install. That gives you 750GB of online storage suitable for streaming media for about $600. When 400GB drives fall to the same $0.40/MB price point, make a new box and sell the old one on ebay, to pay about half the cost of the upgrade.

Re:Promise UltraTrak SX4000

[Yonder Way]

Perhaps you're missing the point. The SX4000 is a scalable device that presents the four disks as one SCSI disk, and the whole thing can be scaled tremendously (especially if you have multiple SCSI controllers or multi-channel controllers). All of this can show on one PC.

What you're talking about saturates the resources of a single PC, and has to squeeze into the confines of one chassis. It is more or less only scalable to the 4x400GB mark and then falls flat.

Re:Promise UltraTrak SX4000

[Anonymous Coward]

I think YOU are missing the point. Just how scalable of a system do you need to store your pics from your last visit to the Star Trek convention?

Retard.

Re:Promise UltraTrak SX4000

[bedessen]

That is a great solution, but it's the antithesis of "turnkey" and is likely the complete opposite of what the "ask slashdot" poster was looking for.

Re:Promise UltraTrak SX4000

[tweedlebait]

I've had a horrible experience with 2 ultratracks-

The controller decided to flag 1 drive in a raid5 as out of sync, (the drive was perfect) then in a few mins. bring it back online and decide that all other drives were out of sync and needed to be rebuilt based on the 1st drive it just de-synched. All the while happily reading the 1st drive's data incorrectly.

On both accounts (after much pressing) promise engineers said the firmware immolated itself. This was all during a few months of uptime on the first occasion and 1 week on a different (test) system and different model of card.

I moved to 3ware since then (about 2 yrs ago) without any real problems. Losing a TB in a redundant system is hard to explain to anyone.

Re:Promise UltraTrak SX4000

[aminorex]

I agree with everything you said, but would note
that by adding PCI RAID IDE controllers, it scales
to the available case cooling and mount points.
I'd probably add some mounting brackets from
erector set pieces and a few fans (and maybe some
acoustic insulation to my closet!!) if I wanted to
scale up to, say 12x400. But that really is the
wall for my personal taste, 3.6TB of RAID 5.
If I ran out of erector set pieces, I'd just pick
up an old gutted tower server case for the job
from ebay or axe-man.

I'd peg the 3.6TB solution at 550 for the
platform, including 3 promise tx2000 cards, and
just under $4k for the drives. That's $1.25
per GB, compared to $0.80 per GB for the 4x250
model. Personally, I'd rather keep multiple
servers, say one for anime and music, one for
data files, one for movies... With network
cross-mounting, it all looks like one big
directory tree anyhow. Of course the middle
road, more drives at the lower $/GB 250GB, $113
sweet spot, still lets you scale to 2.25GB, and
keep it close to $0.80/GB. And it is easier to
upgrade incrementally, by moving one RAID set at
a time to large physical drives, since shuffling
data between controllers is a lot faster than
pumping it over a LAN connection.

I find it easier, faster, and vastly cheaper, to
stick lots of drives and controllers and fans in a
big tower than to buy boutique hardware. I also
find it more reliable, since my personal budget
allows for plenty of spare hardware at the lower
pricepoint. If you really want to run multiple
RAID controllers in a pc case, though, remember
to pick a mondo power supply. you'll probably
need a bunch of power Y connectors too, unless
you're using all SATA drives.

Re:Promise UltraTrak SX4000

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop
posting
in
narrow
columns.
It's
fucking
annoying.

Not going to happen

[digitalchinky]

I'm thinking it'll be unlikely that you'll get an answer here - as 15 other people have said - if you want easy, you pay for it, if you want cheap, you work for it.

And when the house burns down???

[linuxwrangler]

Sure, RAID helps - go grab a 3Ware card for your machine and mirror your data. But things like RAID and dual power-supplies are really in their element when system-availability is important. Ths system keeps running and you can hot-swap the drive or schedule off-hours down-time.

For keeping your data safe, however, RAID is mostly useless - something you will come to realize when the house containing your RAID burns down or when the RAID is stolen by burglars or a human/software glitch manages to "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/yourdisk" your RAID. Power-surge, tornado, flood...the list of things against which RAID fails to protect is long.

If you really care about your data you _must_ perform regular backups and take them off site. I rsync my photos to my work machine and use a VXA tape drive for regular backups.

And I don't bother with RAID except on servers at work.

Re:And when the house burns down???

[Asprin]

Furthermore, RAID won't help you a bit with filesystem errors or if individual files get accidentally deleted or corrupted.

That's why we run tape backups every night.

Re:And when the house burns down???

[fm6]

You hit the nail on the head. Some minor points:

I rsync my photos to my work machine...

Not an option for everybody -- most work machines are behind firewalls. Fortunately, there are a lot of online backup companies.

...and use a VXA tape drive for regular backups.

The kind of solution every geek should have -- you really want regular restore points for your whole system. Alas, at $1K, not within everybody's budget. (My whole setup cost me about $1K.) There used to be a lot of cheap tape cartridge drives, but they were slow and unreliable -- and seem to have disappeared from the market. Sad to say, low-end backup technology seems to lack both providers and customers. Not a good thing.

Re:And when the house burns down???

[fm6]

A good journalling filesystem (NTFS, XFS, ReiserFS, JFS) is pretty resistant to errors. You're right about the danger of human error, but as usual that isn't part of the discussion.

Re:And when the house burns down???

[walt-sjc]

I'll second 3ware. I've had problems with Promise and their "fake" raid, changing chipsets ever 5 minutes and breaking compatability, etc.

3ware isn't cheap but you get what you pay for. High-quality, great performance, great support, and it "just works" with Linux.

I've had issues with several brands / chipsets of onboard SATA controllers, which is why I went with 3ware. Software raid is all fine and good if you can get reliable drivers! If not, then avoid it.

With 1T of storage, you are talking quite a few drives. Make sure you have good cooling, big power supply, etc.

Re:And when the house burns down???

[linuxwrangler]

I rsync my photos to my work machine...

True, but it is an option for me (small company, I run all the machines, company owner is a friend, etc.) It doesn't have to be work. I have friends who backup to each others' machines.

Alas, at $1K, not within everybody's budget...

And that's why you have to get your equipment requests in early when the dot-com goes bust. :)

Seriously, a couple of big drives in hot-swap carriers is a pretty attractive backup option these days.

Re:And when the house burns down???

[linuxwrangler]

Yeah, I finally decided that they named the company "Promise" 'cause they kept "promising" me that the advertised Linux drivers would be available next month. They said that for 2-3 months in a row and when they finally told me that they were planning to beta test them in a month or so I sent the card back, put in a 3Ware and everything installed smoothly with no muss or fuss. Good thing I wasn't desperate for that server at the time.

Re:And when the house burns down???

[Daedala]

Perhaps the cheaper RAID would enable him to afford a good tape backup system and offsite storage.

Re:And when the house burns down???

[kisielk]

That's why you set up weekly, nightly, and several times daily snapshots. That way if human error or file corruption occur, you'd be at most losing a few hours worth of work. It's fairly easy to implement with OSS software such as rdiff-backup, or more expensive but less resource intensive solutions are available. If you have money to burn, you can buy a NetApp and hardly have to worry about data loss ever again.

Re:And when the house burns down???

[tf23]

The easiest solution against theft/fire/physical problems is a few larger capacity sata/eide drives in scsi/firewire enclosures.

You can rsync/backup/incremental backup to those, and make a weekly drop at your bank's safety deposit box.

Depending on the # of drives/enclosures and your directory structure in your raid setup you may be able to put your /pictures on one drive and /music on another drive, etc etc.

This gives you offsite backups. Sure a tape system that could backup everything each nite would be even better, but the cost of such a beast is prohibitive.

Re:And when the house burns down???

[Anonymous Coward]

friends who backup to each others' machines

"back up". ("backup" is a noun.)

Re:And when the house burns down???

[eno2001]

Certainly an interesting point. But... what backup device out there is affordable to the average person that can backup a terabyte or more of data without human intervention? I think the current answer is: none. At this point, I've relegated my backups to a second set of drives. So far, I've lost 9 gigs of data out of 225 gigs due to simultaneous disk failures on both the /mnt/data and /mnt/backup filesystems. Until there is some way for me to throw at least a terabyte of data onto a tape or some other reliable, inexpensive, removable media, HDs are the best backup method. Keep in mind that many of us have many gigs worth of source code and multimedia that we want to hold onto.

Software RAID works for me

[Rheingold]

I use software RAID for most installations. Hardware RAID comes with a high price tag and is a pain to manage (not to mention that the on-disk formats vary not only between vendors but also models, so replacing a dead RAID card can be troublesome at best). Avoid those cheap hardware IDE RAID things; they're cheap because they're slow and not very reliable--software RAID in Linux is quite reliable and fast. Depending on your budget and storage requirements, you could go with IDE or SATA drives (you'll probably need to buy external controllers). I'm not generally keen on RAID5, but if you can afford a hot spare, it's probably your best option.

I usually just make one large MD device and then use LVM to split it up as necessary and grow the logical volumes as necessary. If you just want media storage, you'd probably be fine skipping the LVM and using one large filesystem.

Re:Software RAID works for me

[Rheingold]

I guess this really isn't a turnkey solution... Sorry. You might try Snap appliances, but I suspect turnket solutions are going to cost way more than you could really justify for personal/home storage.

Re:Software RAID works for me

[csirac]

Yes, software RAID is great (effective, flexible, reliable, comparable in performance to cheap hw RAID) and we use it at our work but never would we deploy it for a customer... You say hardware RAID is a pain to manage? Compared to what? Surely not Linux software RAID! Are you kidding?

When the HDD fails with hardware RAID, you rip the drive out, replace it, and it starts rebuilding.

Linux software RAID only works on a per-partition basis.

When the HDD fails with Linux software RAID, you have to repartition the new drive, manually add it to the array that failed, and tell it to resync.

Not to mention the fact that if you are using software RAID on your /boot partition, you have to reload GRUB. And if you want to be able to boot from your secondary drive in 2xdisk RAID-1 mirror, you'll have to do this to install grub on the secondary disk:

grub
grub>device (hd0) /dev/hdc
grub>root (hd0,0)
grub>setup (hd0)

Otherwise, if your primary disk fails, you no longer have a bootable system. This is not good. This is not how hardware RAID would behave, as long as you have all your disks on seperate channels.

The software RAID HOWTO: Booting on RAID

Not so cool. A lot more hassle, overhead and oppurtunity for mistakes than hardware RAID.

So you're back to the old problem: cheap, good, fast, pick any two.

$6,000

[vasqzr]

The thing is, I don't have time to shop for and configure a RAID system myself, and I want a turnkey solution that will just work out of the box


You're paying $6,000 because Apple does the work for you.

I suppose you could get a tower PC, and fill it with hard drives and setup RAID. Cheaper? Yea. Reliable? Yea. But there's more to it than that.

I googled for 'building 1TB server'

http://www.martinandalex.com/blog/archives/2005/01 /building_1tb_ra.html

Home 1TB RAID Server
CPU Athlon 3200+ $199 Frys 11x multiplier, should over clock to 2.6GHz easily
Memory 1GB Corsair 4400C25 $275 Very fast at DDR466
Motherboard ASUS K8N-E Deluxe $149.99 Frys, 6 SATA RAID chips on Motherboard, 3GB memory
Case SUPERMICRO Beige 4U Rackmount Chassis, Model "SC742T-550 Beige" $307.50 New Egg. Has 7 SATA backplane built in
CD drive NEC 3500A $67 newegg or zipzoomfly
system drive WD740GD $185 10000 rpm system drive
Data drive Maxtor DiamondMax 10 250GB $149.99 ($.59/gig vs $.68/gig for 300GB) 5 of these bad boyz

total: $1933.48 or less than $2 per gig for RAID. Half the cost of white boxes and 1/3 the cost of anything from the channel.

Here's another article, more information

http://www.ethics-gradient.net/myth/storage.html

Re:$6,000

[Godeke]

Good googily moogly, did you just suggest someone OVERCLOCK the CPU for a RAID solution? Please tell me you were joking... high reliability != overclocked. (I also find the memory suggestion a bit high for your average home use, but that at least isn't madness.)

Re:$6,000

[Anonymous Coward]

Good googily moogly, did you just suggest someone OVERCLOCK the CPU for a RAID solution? Please tell me you were joking... high reliability != overclocked. (I also find the memory suggestion a bit high for your average home use, but that at least isn't madness.)

I'd be surprised if the RAID server was using 100% of the CPU, especially for a home server, so overclocking shouldn't be necessary.

3 GB of RAM is likely overkill, although the server could make use of it as cache/buffers - I'd go with less RAM, but get ECC. I don't see the purpose of a 10k RPM system disk either. Once the server is booted, it shouldn't touch that disk again.

Maybe a commercial NAS box?

[Jim Morash]

How about the Buffalo Terastation? Only $1k.

Re:Maybe a commercial NAS box?

[Wojski]

I'll be purchasing one of these as soon as they become available. I pondered the building my own thing and the thing is, I don't need to dedicate another machine to this. I can set this up as an appliance and not worry about it. It's always there and running. Price is on the high side, but you pay a premium when you buy anything that just comes out.

Re:Maybe a commercial NAS box?

[shigelojoe]

The one main thing that concerns me about the Buffalo Terastation is the fact that while the client software has support for Windows, Apple, and Linux, the setup utility only has support for Windows.

Re:Maybe a commercial NAS box?

[Oopsz]

do you need to run the setup utility? I would wager it's like the "instant setup" programs that come with NAT routers. If you want to click-through and have it work, then you need windows, but if you don't mind spending 10 minutes configuring it manually, then you can use any OS with a browser.

Looked at this already

[justanyone]

There's two popular RAID cards for the PC. I'm most interested in Raid-5 because the obvious cost-per-gig savings vs. mirror (raid-1) solutions.

1. httP;//www.3Ware.com
2. http://adaptec.com/

The 3ware is quite popular, but the adaptec wins in my book because it will do several things the 3ware one will not:

a. On-line expansion: the ability to expand your array without backing up the data to another location, reconfiguring the array, and reloading the data.
b. Differently sized disks: if I have 2 disks of different sizes, the 3ware one will only do RAID1 with a total size of the smaller of them; likewise with raid-5.

Just some ideas for you...
-- Kevin

Re:Looked at this already

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm, Ok, RAID 1 with a 120 GB and a 100GB drive. OF course you are going to get the size of the smaller one, it can't mirror the 20GB in nothing.
As for Raid5, I think it wants (and I believe this to be true for all raid 5) the same size taken up on all the drives, if you have one taking up more than it won't be an equal distribution.

Re:Looked at this already

[cloudmaster]

If you're running differntly-sized disks, well, then you're not the person hardware RAID is aimed at. Linux software RAID will handle different size disks and will handle online expansion. I'd still get the 3Ware card, and just use it as a fancy disk controller (you'll want more than 4 drives in your system, either way). The 3Ware controllers are faster, better supported, and generally nice devices. They've got a pretty decent web admin iterface too, IMHO, though I regularly forget what port the thing's listening on...

Actually, I'd get a bunch of single-dik firewire enclosures, hook them to Gentoo running on a PPC, and run LVM on top of a software RAID5. But that's because I need a giant drive array for bakcup purposes, and the throughput of firewire is adequate for my needs. Our database server is running a 3ware card with a pair of large drives under RAID-1, and one of our graphics guys is running a 3Ware card with 8 drives in a RAID5. The DB is using hardware to keep CPU time down, while the graphics guy is running hardware because 1) he needs more disk space than 4 IDE channels would allow and 2) maximizing available CPU time is important when rendering large 3D scenes / video effects. :)

I've had 0 problems with the 3Ware products I've used in the past, and that I'm using now. I wholeheartedly reccomend them.

OT: definition of sommercial

[Short Circuit]

sommercial - adj - The business of psychoactive drugs.

sommercial - n - An advertisement for soma.

Source: A Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley

3Ware, 3Ware, 3Ware

[mewyn]

Don't even look at the Adaptec ATA-RAID cards, they are mostly based on the crappy Highpoint chipsets that do pseudo-RAID. What you want is a 3Ware card.

Look to eBay for deals, I managed to get a 3Ware 7820 (I think, it is 8 Channel PATA) for a hundred bucks. Currently I have 2 120G drives attached to it for my main system drives, and I plan on getting 6 more 250-300G drives to build a second array on the device.

The 3Ware cards (mostly, they have one cheap RAID 1 or 0, 2 channel card) support RAID 0, 1, 5, 1+0, JBOD, hot spares, multiple arrays per card, and other enterprise level features. It really does work well.

Re:3Ware, 3Ware, 3Ware

[justanyone]

1. Please cite your data source.
2. Adaptec cards claim to do their raid computations in hardware, meaning the system CPU isn't required to do the computations. This is much better than software raid solutions for obvious performance reasons.
3. As I said, the differentiating factor is the ability to grow a setup by adding a disk, without the need to back up the data to another location. Can 3Ware do this? Last I checked (about 2 months ago) they could not.

Adaptec has a good reputation for quality parts; I've not heard bad things about them (I'm sure there's plenty of people that have had horror stories happen to them) but can anyone else (enterprise sysadmins out there?) comment on reliability and configurability of the Adaptec solutions vs. the 3Ware ones?
-- Kevin

Re:3Ware, 3Ware, 3Ware

[the_maddman]

It's true, the Adaptec 1200 series are dumb psuedo raid, but the 2400 series are real raid cards. I looked at both and went with 3ware at work because of better linux support. I just wish it was fully hotswap.

Re:3Ware, 3Ware, 3Ware

[Anonymous Coward]

I had an Adaptec card that had blatently incorrect information in its tech sheets, claiming to support arrays over 2TB, the card cost a little over $1000 and it turned out that the maximum array size was 2TB, even though the rep on the phone claimed otherwise (as the technical docs said it could do more); the firmware itself has a check for creating arrays larger than 2TB and absolutely won't let you do it. This documentation nightmare will keep me from Adaptec for some time to come, plus I had to bite a $200 restocking fee for returning that piece of junk too. I'll stick with 3ware from now on, at least they don't lie on their specs.

Re:3Ware, 3Ware, 3Ware

[tf23]

3. As I said, the differentiating factor is the ability to grow a setup by adding a disk, without the need to back up the data to another location. Can 3Ware do this? Last I checked (about 2 months ago) they could not.

Yeah, that's the bitch with the 3ware cards. My 8500 can't expand. I heard the newest cards, with their still-beta 3dmd2, can do expansion, but I can't verify that on my own.

eBay, FOOL!

[thenerdgod]

What you really want is a NAS box. Your foolishness about dropping the R-bomb proves your mental inadequacy.

Look for "Snapserver" or, my fave, the Iomega p410u. In a pinch you can netboot it with bigger hard drives, but by default you get >300GB of raid-5 with hot-swap IDE. and with gigabit ethernet, who cares.

Anyway, for mass storage, get to eBay

(note: yeah, yeah, eBay eats babies)

Form Factor

[bhima]

Maybe it's just me... but I'd be a lot more interested in buying an X-Serve RAID if I could just put it next my PowerMac. I need that sort of storage for my photography files but I don't have a rack system and I don't want one. Just another PowerMac box only with the RAID array inside would be great.

Re:Form Factor

[JQuick]

There is a product called Xtrovert by Xtrememac which solves this problem. It attaches to an Xserve RAID unit to turn it into a stable, vertical tower. It is made from anodized aluminum with a matte silver powder coat finish that matches Apple's aluminum products. It costs around $280 bucks.

One source is here: http://www.smalldog.com/product/43611

This is not a stupid question...

[egarland]

Whenever a post about inexpensive Linux based RAID storage comes up on slasodot there is a flurry of:

• "You know why it costs more, right?"
  
• "if you want easy, you pay for it, if you want cheap, you work for it"
  
• "if it's important, then $$ shouldn't matter"
  

and other nonsense excuses for not answering the question.

I'm guessing people have spent a LOT of money on reliable storage solutions and tend to be irrationally dismissive of the possibility of inexpensive redundant storage.

The fact is, if you know Linux well, maintaining a Linux based RAID array for home use is perfectly reasonable and generally quite painless. I build an inexpensive 4 drive 480GB RAID array a few years ago that I've been delighted with since. I have survived a disk failure with minimal downtime and no data loss.

"And when the house burns down?"

I'm so tired of this stupid argument. Data loss due to fire will happen with or without RAID. The fact is, losing a disk is much more likely than having your house burn down by a very large margin (I'd take a rough guess that disk loss in a 8 disk system is about 10,000 times more likely than disk loss from fire). But even if they happened with the same frequency you'd still be reducing your exposure by 50% by eliminating data loss from disk failure with RAID.

I have yet to find an online company selling properly configured systems for a reasonable price.

I thought about building a standalone storage server recently and saved my design in a newegg wishlist

For rack mount RAID systems I like the design cases they have at www.rackmountpro.com but I've never dealt with them personally so I can't say how well they work.

Re:This is not a stupid question...

[arkanes]

Why are you putting dual Athlon 64s into a file server? That's 20% of your cost right there.

Re:This is not a stupid question...

[Anonymous Coward]

I used dual Xeons in my fileserver while I was doing software RAID, you'd be surprised just how much CPU power it takes to do software RAID 5, keep SMB, NFS, etc going [then again, maybe you wouldn't :)]. Once I switched to a hardware RAID solution, I was able to take that other Xeon and use it elsewhere. I would recommend that if that Highpoint is a hardware RAID controller (not sure) that the second Opteron should be dropped (my own experiences with this matter support that; at least with Opterons)

Re:This is not a stupid question...

[nmos]

"And when the house burns down?"

I'm so tired of this stupid argument. Data loss due to fire will happen with or without RAID. The fact is, losing a disk is much more likely than having your house burn down by a very large margin (I'd take a rough guess that disk loss in a 8 disk system is about 10,000 times more likely than disk loss from fire).

You're taking that arguement too literally. The point is that there are many things that proper backups can protect you from that RAID cannot. For example, the most common cause of data loss by far is human error. RAID won't help with that but a backup will. Other things, breakins, silent corruption due to glitches in hardware or software , power surges etc.

There is nothing wrong with RAID but thinking of it as alternative to backing up WILL come back to bite you.

Re:This is not a stupid question...

[Dr.Dubious DDQ]

Well, you could write a Samba VFS module or something of the sort which automatically intercepts video media and re-encodes it to Ogg Theora on the fly or something I suppose...

(You know, I was joking when I started writing that, but the poster DID say it was for storing "large media files" - maybe he DOES intend to do some sort of server-side processing of the files...)

Re:This is not a stupid question...

[trawg]

I have yet to find an online company selling properly configured systems for a reasonable price.

There's the Terabyte Network Attached Storage which looks neat, though not rack mountable :(

Re:This is not a stupid question...

[Mark Hood]

I have yet to find an online company selling properly configured systems for a reasonable price.

And that's what he wanted, or have I mis-understood 'turnkey'...?

The fact is, if you know Linux well, maintaining a Linux based RAID array for home use is perfectly reasonable and generally quite painless. I build an inexpensive 4 drive 480GB RAID array a few years ago that I've been delighted with since. I have survived a disk failure with minimal downtime and no data loss.

Whenever my employer (and I don't speak for them, by the way) offers something as 'turnkey' it means that the customer turns the key in the lock of the door, and the system is right there working for them. That's what he asked for. I suspect what he meant was, "can I just put 2 hard disks in my PC and download a package to do it all for me" which would still be better than 'if you know Linux well'.

People answered the question that was asked, not the implied 'can Linux do this for less money than Apple'...

Mark

PS, I'm not flaming you, many of your points are valid - but the question wasn't what a lot of people have been answering.

Re:This is not a stupid question...

[beegle]

The fact is, if you know Linux well

The fact is, if you know linux well, then you don't need to bother asking Slashdot.

If you -don't- know linux well, then the price that you pay will be your free time. Setting up your first stable (and properly backed-up) LVM system can be quite time-consuming. For some people, it's not fun, so spending an extra thousand dollars is a better deal than losing a few weekends.

Re:This is not a stupid question...

[Anonymous Coward]

There is nothing wrong with RAID but thinking of it as alternative to backing up WILL come back to bite you.

Which raises the question of how do you inexpensively back up a 1TB file-server?

LaCie F800

[kinema]

LaCie recently announced their F800 desktop RAID solution. 1.0, 1.6 and 2.0 terabyte models are available. The array connects to a host computer via IEEE1394 (Firewire) or USB 2.0. The array can be configured as RAID levels 0, 0+1, 5, and RAID 5+hot spare. PriceGrabber lists the 1.0TB version for just under US$1500 and the 1.6TB for US$2700.

Re:LaCie F800

[kawika]

From the LaCie site:

"total capacity for RAID 0, 50% of total capacity for RAID 0+1, 75% of total capacity for RAID 5, 50% of total capacity for RAID 5+spare"

So their 2TB setup is more like 1 or 1.5TB if you want any kind of data safety. It also must be using the bleeding-edge Hitachi 500GB drives, which haven't proven themselves yet--I don't think they're even shipping.

When is 1TB not 1TB?

[Shag]

You haven't really made it clear whether you want 1TB worth of raw disk, or 1TB of mirrored (or mirrored and striped) RAID volume. 1TB of raw disk shouldn't cost $6000 (in fact, you can get a single-CPU Xserve G5 with 3x400GB disks for under $5000, and that's got actual processing capability, not just storage) but unless you just do RAID 0 striping (which gives you speed, but not redundancy) you may wind up with less than 1TB. RAID 1 mirroring will give you redundancy, but you'll lose lots of disk space. Something that does striping with parity, like RAID 5, would be better, but you're probably looking at a special drive controller then.

Ask a better question....

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

You didn't say:
1. How much money you want to spend, just that $6k is too much.
2. How fast you want it.
3. Whether or not it needs to be quiet or has to run in an unairconditioned garage.
4. Whether or not you want a "headless" server or a Linux box with vga and keyboard 5. Why you're willing to maintain and upgrade it but not build it.

In short, you're probably not a geek else you'd be digging into this and figuring it out yourself. Or at least asking better questions.

Re:Ask a better question....

[youngerpants]

No, he shouldn't ask those questions, because this is "Ask Slashdot" not "Flame me into oblivion becasue I've tried to ask a complex question in a single paragraph"

Oh, and your comment of "In short, you're probably not a geek" just makes me think; grow up and move out of your mothers basement becasue I can't WAIT to see you get a new asshole ripped in the real world.

Honestly, its numnuts like you who really piss me off.

To paraphrase; there are no stupid questions, just stupid answers. You know what, that was possibly the stupidest answer I have ever heard

Re:Ask a better question....

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

Fuck you poser. As to being in the real world, I was fixing minicomputers when you were pissing diapers. I have a 2 million dollar company of my own and a 1/2 million dollar house. What have you got?

Re:Ask a better question....

[demmegod]

I'm betting he's got a dick bigger than 1/2"... Much unlike you are sounding to have.

Re:Ask a better question....

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow... you've made the world a brighter place, good sir.

Re:Ask a better question....

[youngerpants]

I'm sorry madam, you appear to have dropped your handbag, would you like me to pick it up for you...

And your reply obviously goes to show my initial comments concerning your unecessary flaming. Grow up.

(oh, I live in a £750,000 home... thats about 1.5M of your dollars, thats because I wasn't fixing minicomputers when you were "pissing diapers", I was busy).

Honestly, what a prick

Re:Ask a better question....

[Anonymous Coward]

Shut the fuck up Ron, you fucking ugly motherfucker. Or I'll break your fucking face.

eRacks, other alternatives

[Noksagt]

I actually think that the XServe returns quite a bit for what you pay them. You can DIY for perhaps 1/4 of the price & a lot of time & some cursing. If you want a cheaper solution, I have been fairly happy with a recent purchase from eRacks. If you want something a little more end, get a SNAP serve or something similar. Or, get a couple of those 1 TB external disks & use software RAID 1.

mmmm

[Fr05t]

mmmmm turkey *drool*.. oh you didn't say turkey? :(

too late...

[sribe]

The thing is, I don't have time to shop for and configure a RAID system myself, and I want a turnkey solution that will just work out of the box. I'm aware of Apple's XServe, but $6000 for 1 TB is just too expensive. What are my best options if I want to buy an open source system that I can maintain and upgrade if need be?

Well, clearly what you should have done was to pay me < $1,000 for the sweet sweet dot-bomb (sort of) leftover that I donated to charity last week. Too late, so sorry--RedHat installed & configured, dual PIIIs, 1GB ECC RAM, dual SCSI 160 busses, mirrored boot drive, 6-bay hot-swap hardware RAID-5 with Cheetah drives, CD-RW, DVD-RAM, extra hot-swap bay for toting around big files...

Seriously though, take a careful look on eBay. I listed the above machine with a reasonable starting bid (<$500 IIRC) and got 0 bids. The secondhand market is still pretty saturated with high-quality stuff from companies that went broke during the tech "retrenchment". Yeah, there's a lot of junk on eBay too, but you might be able to find what you want.

Promise UltraTrak + Hitachi's new beasts

[mduell]

Promise UltraTrak SX4000 - $1150
4x Hitachi 7K500 500GB drives (should be out RSN) - $1200-1500
A good U160 SCSI card for one of your computers - $200.

For about $2500-3000 (half the price of an Xserve RAID), you can have 1TB of RAID0+1.

Tape drive.

[SenatorTreason]

Rather than buy a turnkey RAID solution, buy a cheap machine and a nice tape drive. Use the cheap machine as your media server (no RAID), and use the nice, big tape drive to make the necessary backups. As other people have mentioned, there are a lot of bad things that RAID doesn't protect against, but off-site backups do.

Everyone forgets LSI

[Ayanami Rei]

LSI megaraid is another really decent options. Cards are between $100-$350 bucks, and get it with sata or scsi support, option for PCI-X, hardware raid-5 whole shebang. Excellent drivers.

Re:Everyone forgets LSI

[csirac]

I had a very bad experience with LSI SCSI RAID in an IBM zSeries.

Between me, customer's software vendor who built/configured the thing, IBM, Microsoft and the local IBM maintenance reps - we couldn't turn off write-back cache. At all. Windows 2000 had "couldn't disable write-back cache" errors spewing all over the system log every 10 seconds until I applied a hotfix so that now it was only once per minute.

The IBM guys actually said "We're not that familiar with LSI RAID". He had a simulator in front of him and still couldn't help me out. They told me to break the mirror and rebuild it - the option should be available when creating the mirror. It wasn't. It takes a long time to ghost 20GB over USB and then back again.

We did BIOS updates, HDD firmware updates, driver updates, windows updates, two hotfixes... after billing around 15 hours (at a discounted rate) IBM said they would handle the case themselves. Apparently they got Microsoft to update the hotfix for them.

I get the feeling the event log errors were spurious, but when asked "does this suppress a spurious error or actually fix something" with the original hotfix, I was told it did actually fix something. Nobody wanted to tell me to just ignore the errors, because it used the words "data corruption may occur". The customer was having data corruption (and other) problems.

I get the feeling that if the customer hadn't been so cheap and actually ran Win2003 which the server was designed for instead of Win2k, it would not have happend.

Funny thing is I had to run the whole show off an el-cheapo single 40GB WD IDE HDD because they couldn't handle any more down time. This "temporary" solution stayed for 5 months until it was fixed properly. That they spent over AUD $7000 for all the big black IBM with SCSI hot-swap RAID and ended up running off AUD $100 HDD anyway...

Similar Problem

[Usquebaugh]

I want something similar. I'm probably going with a firewire raid tower.

I only want to use the disk on one machine so NAS is overkill.
I only need moderate speed so SCSI is out.
I need >1gb of logical drive space.
I want hot swap.
I don't need to run another OS, just a dvice to manage the array and connect to my desktop.

Cost is likel to be around $2k. I might get lucky on ebay but it's unlikely.

SAN?

[Dr.Dubious DDQ]

I'm looking for a roughly similar "solution" - adequate performance with redundancy and lots of storage space. A "SAN" ("Storage Area Network" - one of the current buzzwords going around these days) might be useful.

Either iSCSI (if you want economical and standards-based) or Fiber-Channel (if you're wealthy and the speed of writes to the hard drive array is critical) based boxes of hard drives seems to be an option, and from the point of view of the server (or whatever computer is using them) they are just another hard drive. Or so the materials I've read say. (Think of them as an external RAID box...)

iSCSI seems to be limited to 1Gb speeds (unless you can get your hands on 10Gb ethernet cards and switch, which I gather are now available), which to me seems perfectly adequate for most file-server type uses. It looks to my still-new-to-the-area eye that you can also do a lot of potentially useful tricks because of the standard IP-based nature of the data transfer (such as being able to mount a "hard drive" directly over the internet or a LAN, if you have some reason to need to do so). Fiber-channel is faster (2Gb seems to be typical, 4Gb is apparently getting fairly established, and 8Gb is available if you're made of money) but requires specialized and fairly expensive hardware ($500+ for each fiber-channel interface card at the LOW end, as I recall, plus several thousand for the fiber-channel equivalent of a "switch".)

On the subject of iSCSI, there seem to be active projects with both "target" (iSCSI device server) drivers and "client" (iSCSI device mounting) drivers for Linux on Sourceforge...

Corrections welcome, of course...

Incidentally, that's not to be confused with "NAS" ("Network Attached Storage") which as far as I can tell is a buzzword used by people due to the fact that "file server" doesn't sound "cool" any more...your "NAS" might be using a "SAN" to store the drives that it is serving...

In any case, this may be me trying to "hijack" this Ask Slashdot, but what do people here think of the "SAN" concept and its implementations?

Raidcore, RAIDCORE , R A I D C O R E!

[beernutz]

Ive said it before and ill say it again! RAIDCORE!!!

Everyone seem to think that raidcore is not in the game, but i am telling you that it ROCKS.

The standard line is that it is software raid. This is not the case. You can boot and run dos off of a raidcore with no drivers. The only reason i say this is to underscore that there is no REQUIREMENT to do software raid with this board.

They DO have a driver which allows a software ASSIST to increase speed of the XOR calculation if you have the spare cycles.

The reason you want to go wtih radicore is that you can expand the array LIVE and without backing up your data. They do things that 3Ware WISHES they could do. Like live raid level migration, live expansion, card spanning, etc..

I have a system with one raidcore and 8 250 gig sata drives. It is in a Raid-5 level config, and runs GREAT! I had a bad drive and the controller did exactly what it was suposed to. Namely, it marked the drive bad, sent me an email, and kept on running fine. I pulled the bad drive (live i might add), put in a good one (still live), and it rebuilt all in the background with NO issues.

Say what you want about 3Ware, Adaptec, Promise and all the others, but NONE of them has the level of features that this card does.

Raidcore

Coraid

[happynut]

You could try installing a Coraid box, which has a 10 disk chassis for $2500. You can load any disk you want, and attach it over the network.

Re:Coraid

[Anonymous Coward]

Friend of mine is testing a 10-disk Coraid box now, and he wrote up his real-world performance findings: http://www.viraj.org/b2evolution/blogs/index.php/2 005/02/10/raid_on_a_coraid

One more thing I'd consider unreliable

[tweedlebait]

Western Digital drives in a RAID config.

Against my spidey-sense I made a few arrays out of the 100 and 120 gb ide offerings from WD- Some did not like being on the controllers (promise and 3ware), some needed a huge ammount of extra power to boot and not recaliberate/reset or spin down(!).

In the end, all 20 are now dead after 2 years of use, the first 15 failed in the first 6 months (and yes all were oem).

Congratulations!

[powdered toast dude]

I just want to be told what to buy so I can get on with other things

Congratulations! Your application to PHB candidate school has been accepted. A rewarding career awaits you.

Just kidding, of course. This kind of SAN device should be as ubiquitous as a TV. Unfortunately the general consumer doesn't know (s)he needs one, and the market isn't scrambling to provide them. Yet, hopefully.

$0.02,
ptd

A couple options

[ctr2sprt]

You have a couple options for how to go with this. The hardest requirement you've got is capacity expansion: even many high-end RAID cards won't let you do that, though the feature is becoming more common. If you want to save money, you might want to reconsider that requirement. But you can still "emulate" the feature, though what you get won't be quite as good. Basically what you do is set up a regular, non-expandable array using something like RAID5. Then, when you need more space, you build another (non-expandable) array which is the same size of slightly larger. Because disk is getting cheaper every day this will usually not be a problem: spending the same amount 6 months from now will probably net you 20-50% more capacity. Then you make your new array into a linear LVM volume with one subvolume (the entire new array). You copy over all your old data to the volume, then trash the old array, rebuild it, and add it to the LVM volume. The volume isn't redundant and it isn't striped, but both of your actual arrays are, so you still have pretty good performance and reliability. If this level of complexity doesn't really appeal to you, you can of course just mount both arrays separately and use your brain to fill them up evenly. (Your brain or a bunch of symlinks.)

As far as building the actual arrays goes, that's easier because there are fewer choices. The cheapest (at first blush) approach is to use something like external USB or Firewire disks and software RAID. You don't need an expensive controller card, hot-swap backplane, power supply, or case: the intiial cost of investment is low. The downside is that USB and Firewire disks are much more expensive per GB than regular internal SATA or IDE disks. And while the interface is capable of being faster than SATA/IDE, I suspect those external disk boxes are going to be a good bit slower than regular disks. Still, if you are building an array piecemeal, buying one or two disks at a time, this is the approach I would recommend.

If you have resigned yourself to spending Big Money in one lump purchase, then you will want to do it "right." Buy a hardware RAID card, a hefty power supply, and a case with lots of room. Since cost is a factor, you will want to use SATA or IDE. I recommend SATA simply because cable management is so much easier than with IDE, and the drives are only 5% or so more expensive now; but YMMV, it doesn't really matter which you choose. As for the RAID card to use, decide on what OSes you might be using with the server. If you want FreeBSD, you are pretty much limited to 3ware. If you want Linux, then 3ware and Adaptec should both be fine. Windows is naturally supported by everyone. You'll note that I haven't mentioned the "buy a lot of cheap 2-port PCI controllers and do software RAID" option. Well, not only do those cheap controllers suck ass, many of them only support one or two controllers per machine. You can do it, but it's such a headache I'd rather just drop an extra $200 or so on a many-port RAID card.

For the case to get, the simplest approach is to buy a regular desktop case with a good number of 5.25" bays. You can then buy a "5-to-3 hot-swap backplane," which is a box that fits in three adjacent 5.25" bays and has five hot-swap trays for hard disks. My reason for recommending this isn't really cost, it's that it's tough to find cases which come with hot-swap IDE/SATA bays. SuperMicro sells some, which you can find on Newegg. I have one and it's great. But remember that many of those cases "support dual Xeon processors," which means they come with special 24-pin power supplies and won't work with your P4/Athlon motherboard without an adapter (which is impossible to find). As a final caution, if you are putting in lots of hard disks, make sure you get a case with (a) lots of fans; and (b) a hefty (450W or greater) power supply. I'm using a 450W P/S in my case, because of the above-noted Xeon P/S issue, and it's not sufficient to power four 7200rpm SATA disks: under heavy load one

Re:A couple options

[Anonymous Coward]

The EPS (24-pin) to ATX (20-pin) power supply adapters are EASY to find. http://www.servercase.com has them for like $6 and they're all over eBay. A high-quality (NOT Antec) 460W power supply should easily power 10 or more SATA drives...look at Zippy/Emacs. I have their 460W unit powering a Athlon64 3400+, 1 gig RAM, 8 250gb drives, a 36gb Raptor, and several fans. Works great. They have a 700W unit that should easily handle 20+ drives...

linux with 3ware

[tf23]

I did this - see So I'm buildin a fileserver.

My only complaints with my 3ware card:

1) no live expansion
2) haven't had much luck running 3dm/2 with Fedora Core 3 and my 8500-8 card.

Other then that, it's been great. The entire family uses the server for various needs. And knowing that all of our digital pictures are that much safer is nice.

Learn from others who've done this already

[cowbutt]

a good recipe for a 1.2TB Linux-based RAID for under US$1600.

Serial ATA RAID

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been playing around with various RAID devices here. I have SCSI RAID which expensive but very reliable. ATA parallel RAID but limited to two disk. SATA which very good, expanable and inexpensive. I used LSI-Logic 6-port SATA RAID card with three 160-GB SATA drives running RAID 5. The total cost was under $1000. I have all of these running in my current case with space for two more drives for expansion.
Remember you need enough space in you system to fit these drives inside your system and have enough power to plug all of these drives. If you don't then the cost of an extenal enclosure and power will drive up the cost.
Also you should have an battery for the RAID so you don't lose any data if you lose power and remember the setting of the RAID.

SAN Implementations

[green pizza]

Most of the SAN implemtations I've seen have used 2Gb FC_AL (Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop).

As long as all of the FC devices you use have fabric support, all you need a SAN filesystem and perhaps a metadata server and you're good to go.

One sample setup would be this:
Brocade FC switch
Xserve RAID (just the RAID box, not a server)
Mac w/ FC card
PC w/ FC card

The Mac, PC, and RAID box are each plugged into the FC switch. Now either machine can access the RAID directly through this FC SAN. There is no need for a file server / NAS.

However, you could (or might even be required to) add a server into this SAN. The server would be a "metadata server" to keep tabs on this big shared filesystem. It could also be used as a traffic cop / permissions manager / etc. But each PC or Mac connected to this SAN would still be able to access the RAID directly over fibrechannel. The server could be used as a generic file server (a "NAS") so that machines on the same LAN, but not on this FC SAN, could access the RAID indirectly.

Does this make any sense? It's hard to describe without drawing a picture.

More SAN fun

[green pizza]

I'd also like to add that most SANs serve one or two purposes:

1) SPEED! No need to access the data through a server. You can connect directly over fibrechannel.

2) Server redundancy. You might want to keep your data on a hardware RAID-5 box, such as the Apple Xserve RAID. You could then have two servers connected to the RAID. One server would be doing all of the work while the other would be a hot backup. In the event that the primary server dies, the secondary server could mount the RAID and take over. (This has been done for years with oldschool "high voltage" differential SCSI)

I know next to nothing about iSCSI and how it relates to all of this. I have only worked with oldschool differential SCSI and with FC.

rebyte.com - a software NAS/RAID solution for $149

[Anonymous Coward]

Rebyte is a Compact Flash card based device (w/ Linux) you attach to the ATA interface on the motherboard on one side and the HDDs on the other. It costs only $149 and it offers what you need (NAS, RAID 1,5).

Bing Bing Bing....

[vwjeff]

we have a winner.

Repeat after me...

RAID IS NOT A BACKUP.

Here's how I do my backup....

1. I have a computer with 2x200 GB drives mirrored.
2. I do an incremental backup of the data on these drives every other day to DVD-R discs. (I do not keep the discs for more than 6 months)
3. Every other month I do a full backup and take it off site. (Safety deposit box)
4. I rsync my critical data every four hours to an offsite server which is backed up to tape every night.

Most of the data that I back up is not critical. Much of it is music, movies, etc. that could be replaced but would take time. I do not want to rip all of my cds and dvds again.

I classify critical data as something that can not be replaced or replicated without a huge amount of effort. This includes family photos, documents, etc.

The only reason I use RAID at home is that the drives will eventually fail. When they do fail, hopefully not at the same time, I will only need to pop a new drive in. It is all about convenience and saving time. That is it.

home raid with firewire external enclosures

[MrBlic]

Hi,

I just ran out of space on my old raid array (two 200GB drives in a gentoo linux machine with software raid 1 mirroring.) I also was inspired by the slashdot story about someone who did a iPod shuffle raid using a usb hub... and since I just ordered a mac mini, I wanted to do something similar, but with actual hard drives. The screenshots of the OS X raid configuration in the disk tool sold me on the idea.

I checked out Tom's hardware for hard drive enclosures that could power and connect some cheap 200GB Maxtor drives. link and decided on the Nexstar NST-350UF. Each enclosure is small, fanless, and has two firewire ports, so I can chain lots of drives as my raid array grows.

Newegg sells enclosures for about $45 and 200GB drives for about $105, so I'm starting off with 400GB raid5 (three drives) for about $350, and will be able to upgrade to 600GB for another $150 when I need to.

I'm anticipating a few problems... 7200rpm drives in fanless enclosures might not last very long... I ran them for 24 hours and they were pretty warm to the touch. Firewire adds a little latency on each access, and raid5 tends to access the drives as a set, so I might be creating a fast-as-oatmeal volume.

Wish me luck.

-Jim

I'm surprised people haven't mentioned...

[Trixter]

...Buffalo's Terastation. Check this.