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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."
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/2005/0
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
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?
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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.
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