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.

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.