Turning a PC into a Firewire-Based SAN?

Rachovenov asks: "So I've finally plunked down the money for one of those new, shiny Powerbooks, but they don't have much storage. My old PC is just sitting here with 2 identical 250 gig disks spinning away and an empty firewire port. There's even a hardware RAID controller in there somewhere. So why not use it as a low cost RAID 1 array for the Powerbook when I'm at home? Has anyone done this? How could I make it so that Mac OS X just sees it as a couple of Firewire drives?"

Comments

Oh... crap. My bad.

[Ayanami Rei]

You wanted the PC itself to be act as a firewire drive?

Good luck. Macs have this built into the firmware, not PCs. I don't think it's even on anyone's radar. But I don't imagine it's too difficult to write something that could do the job using libraw1394 and the SBP2 documentation.

Good luck!

Firewire

[Cthefuture]

Pop a gigabit ethernet card in your big machine and use a regular network connection. No need to get complicated with Firewire networking or whatever.

Re:Firewire

[Anonymous Coward]

GbE is faster than Firewire too. Well, faster than FW400. FW800 would be a toss-up since GbE has more protocol overhead.

You probably won't get the full benefit of FW800 or GbE without a machine with PCI-X, PCI-E or similar. In that case GbE will do as good as anything (and cheap).

Re:Firewire

[Glonoinha]

Yea ... if only there was a way to make a PC running Windows serve up those files over Ethernet to other computers, perhaps by letting those other computers map to a share or something.

Naw, that would never work.

Re:Errrr...

[Kalak]

Errrr...Did you read the question at all? That is not an answer to the question. He's not looking for a Firewire disk container, but to turn a PC into a firewire device.

AFAIK, IIRC, the only way to do this would be to raid the drives on the PC and export them via NFS or SMB and set up TCP/IP over firewire.

Re:RAID

[TheCrip]

Not unless he's running RAID 1. Not everyone is running a stripe.

Here's what I would do -without googling of course

[numbski]

Do a minimal MINIMAL Linux or FreeBSD install. I mean just as small as you can get, but include NFS and IP-over-Firewire.

That's about it really, set up a nice link to mount your device when you come in, plug in your firewire. Heck, I think you can configure the automounter to detect when the firewire network becomes available and mount it for you. That's really all there is to it. Should work out pretty well. On a side note, if you plug in a third drive, even if your SCSI card doesn't support it, you could use Vinum on FreeBSD or LVM on Linux to add capacity, and at least on Vinum you can do RAID5 or RAID10. It won't be as fast as hardware RAID, but hey when you're going cheap, you use what you can. Besides, I somehow suspect that you're wanting capacity over speed anyway, and if that's the case, use the best redundancy you can, right?

Don't - build a server instead

[JackAsh]

I hate to point it out, but that is not the solution you are looking for (waves hand).

You already have a PC, and the two disks built inside. Mirror or stripe the drives in the system (your choice, I'd got for a mirror) and then install Linux or BSD or whatever server-ish operating system you want on the box with the right services (Samba, NFS, whatever). Connect to it with IP over firewire, Ethernet, or gigabit ethernet if the old system supports it (the laptop does).

This will allow the system to keep running when you are not around, will allow you to use the disk over that fancy wireless connection on your new Po-po-po-powerbook!. If you put SSH on the box I'm sure you'll figure out how to access your home disk from the road (for bonus points roll your own remote file access solution based on some creative web based interface running on port 443 that no one will ever block).

Last but not least, you'll be able to access the disk from the PowerMac system you'll eventually buy when you realize that the Powerbook is just a touch slow, the keyboard is not so comfortable, and the trackpad is complete crap (mind you, I have a 17" PB myself and love it to death, but all of the above are true and that's the reason I use a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse with it when it's "docked" at home).

-Jack Ash

Has anyone done this?

[captnitro]

See a previous Slashdot story entitled Home-brewing a 1.2TB IDE to Firewire Monster. He constructed a huge firewire "disk" out of a nice case and most importantly, a couple firewire-IDE bridges. It's not PC-based, however, it's a dumb array of drives.

Custom distributions

[Matthias Wiesmann]

As people have more and more old machines lying around, having a live CD with a single purpose operating system. I think there are already distributions that transform a PC into a router, but changing an old PC into a firewire hard drive enclosure looks like an interesting idea.

One advantage of this approach over installing a file-server is that the hard drives are seen directly by the OS, this means you can boot of them, do low level manipulations (like formatting them), directly from the client machine.

One such distribution I would like to see (one can dream), is that changes an old PC into a advanced dock for a laptop. Typically, a thing I can connect my laptop to, and I get to use the peripherals of the PC: hard-drives, CD-drive, keyboard, mouse, heck even the floppy drive.

The goal would be to have all those devices recognised as being devices attached to the laptop, i.e no client server protocol to share them - basically the PC would pretend to be a firewire or USB hub with a lot of devices attached.

Maybe I would even make sense to use the sound-card of the PC. Not so long ago I would have suggested also to access the display of the PC and use its CPU as a powerful GPU, but given the graphical cards one can now find in laptops, this makes no sense.

Re:What's with the ._* files with macs using samba

[SkipRosebaugh]

That's for the resource fork. That file may be useless to you, but depending on what type of file it is, it may be quite important to him. Don't delete them before you understand the nature of the resource fork.

gotta agree with the rest

[sootman]

I've done a fair number of tests comparing speeds from moving files via 10/100, gigE, firewire, and IP over FireWire. Long story short: 100bT and anything over firewire are neck-and-neck. Gigabit Ethernet blows them away. So set up the box as a server, using gig-E if possible. Not sure about the PC, but you can connect two gig-E Macs with a straight (*not* crossover) cable and they'll automagically connect properly and you get gig-E speeds--like moving a 650 MB disk image in 30 seconds instead of 90 seconds over 10/100, IP-over-FW, or to a firewire disk.

Yeah, it'd be nice if you could just put the PC into target disk mode like a Mac, but you can't. There are some advantages and disadvantages, but I think the advantages of a server--even ignoring the whole "server setup is easy, target disk mode with Intel hardware is just about impossible" thing--would win over using it as an attached disk.

Among other things, you can tuck it anywhere--it doesn't have to be a firewire cable's length away. And since it's networked based, it's easier to share, and can even be accessed (thought more slowly) via wireless.

Exactly what you want

[The Iconoclast]

I found this a while ago at http://www.linux1394.org/:

http://oss.oracle.com/projects/endpoint/ - it turns a linux machine into a SBP-2 endpoint.

Re:Exactly what you want

[bruciferofbrm]

Interesting in its own right. But seems to be under documented on the site at least. And it is from 2003.

If I had firewire I'd play with this too. Maybe it is time to pick up a couple of multi port firewire cards.

But, so far (at first glance) the lack of documentation, and the age of the release may not make this an easy solution to impliment.

Drive cages

[RabidMonkey]

I had the same space issues with my Toshiba notebook ... Until someone pointed out USB 2.0 drive cages.

I snared 2 ($25 a piece) and put my 2 120gig drives in. Plug em in, Windows (I know you have a Mac, but it should be similar I'd hope) detects them and I've got 240gig of space on top of the 20gig that my laptop has. easy as that.

There are also firewire cages out there if you're hooked on that.

Cheap and easy. The only downside I've found so far is that, be cause the drives are in cages and independantly powered, they never stop spinning until you unplug them. I don't see the need to have my drives spinning all the time, especially when my laptop isn't even there, so I put them on a power bar to make turning them off easy when it's time to take the laptop on the road.

$0.02 CDN.

Re:What's with the ._* files with macs using samba

[Zachary Kessin]

Its how mac OS stores some metadata for the finder. (File labels and such) the best bet would be to use find from a crontab to go and get rid of them every so often.

ISCSI

[bruciferofbrm]

I also suggest ISCSI.

I know you want to bank on your firewire connections. Go for it.

Iscsi would give you the ability to connect to shared block devices in your machine via TCPIP networking. If you do that over firewire, or Twisted pair 10/100, or wireless, you can leverage alot more then a direct connection. For one, you would not have to be within what ever limit is imposed by your firewire cabling situation.

ISCSI can be implimented entirely in software. There are ISCSI target (host) software solutions that let you turn a PC (X86 is what I know and have played with) into a destination (hosting the drives). You can allocate the drives as you desire. And it is fast.

However, I am not certain on the MAC software side of the deal. There is one company (at least) called ATTO who claim to have a software ISCSI initiator called XTEND SAN. But it seems they have been talking about it for a while, with no release. ARDIS also claims to have one, but only for OEM companies.

I have played the software route on Windows and Linux. It is fast and cool to do it all in software. A hardware ISCSI initiator (think scsi card combine with ethernet card) costs way to much for the casual user ($500 +).

And yes, none of this has any meaning to you if there is no software ISCSI initiator for your mac.

(umm.. you also didn't really state what your OLD PC really is.. Is it a PC in the Windows/X86 sense? Or is a PC in the sense of another Mac? (do we all naturally assume PC means Windows?)

Re:ISCSI

[Kalak]

You'd have to do this with linux as the target and get an OS X initiator program (iSANmp is one I just found via google for OSX). Since the iSCSI device exported would have to be HFS/HFS+, you'd have to get the driver for linux if you want to read it from the "server".

Looking at http://www.ardistech.com/index.html?id=12&lang= looks interesting, but this is new territory for me (just found out that the iSCSI drive enclosure we were looking at for work to connect to some Linux servers was way out of our budget). You could add this to IP over Firewire to get basically what your looking for (in theory). Gigabit would still be faster than firewire.