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

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.

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???

[Daedala]

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

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.

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.

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: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

[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.