HOWTO: 0.5TB RAID on a Budget

Compu486 writes "Inventgeek.com has a new how-to article titled 'The Poor Mans Raid Array.' The article details how to make a modular .5 terabyte Raid 5 array for under $250 (USD), and it all runs on the Mandriva flavor of Linux." Drive prices being what they are, this seems cooler than it is practical. Update: 06/25 23:31 GMT by T : If that's not enough storage, Yeechang Lee writes "Let me show off the 2.8TB Linux-powered RAID 5 array I built for home use a few months ago. I provide lots of details on how I did it, what I used, and the results. The Usenet thread has good followup posts from others, too."

Comments

typical?

[mnemonic_]

this seems cooler than it is practical.
Perfect for slashdot!

Re:typical?

[Rei]

Many home RAID setups that I have seen are more for show than they are as a speedup. Most of them are RAID 0 - i.e., they're for "performance", not redundancy (I assume the reason is that most people don't want half their space to dissapear with RAID 1, but don't want to have to use enough drives to make RAID 5 effective). Yet the primary performance limits on a home PC's disk performance (apart from operating-system issues like the filesystem and caching) are latency-based, not throughput based; RAID, if anything, will increase your latency.

If you want a high performance system, spend the money to get a small, top-of-the-line drive for your root partition (15k rpm SCSIs are nice, if you have a scsi card - you can get a 9 gig for 30$ including shipping, an 18 gig for 55$), and then put all of your space-consuming files (movies, music, etc) on your cheap bulk storage. Get enough spare ram to have good disk caching. And, of course, choose a good filesystem for small files - ReiserFS works well for me, but there are a lot of good options.

You only need major throughput if you're doing a lot of very long file reads that need to occur at top speed (i.e., not playing video or listening to music; more like what you need for running a large relational database, or being a fileserver on a crazy-fast network). To the "Raid 0" crowd: Does this really fit your disk's typical usage patterns?

Re:typical?

[lcs-150]

Don't forget that many decent RAID controllers will have either integrated or upgradeable cache memory, often 128MB or greater. That can decrease latency significantly, especially compared to a single disk with a much smaller cache.

Re:typical?

[_Shorty-dammit]

yup, lots of video editing, raid0 works well. Saves a lot of time.

Re:typical?

[Anonymous Coward]

"To the "Raid 0" crowd: Does this really fit your disk's typical usage patterns?"

I've never understood why RAID snobs have a problme with consumers running RAID 0. Who are you to say its only useful if your doing XXXX? And I'm sorry but your just wrong that the only benefit is increased throughput. Everyone I know who has ever run RAID 0 has felt that it has lead to a better more responsive system. This "latency hit" that your talking about is myth and has no impact compared to the benefits RAID 0 brings.

Re:typical?

[jelle]

"RAID, if anything, will increase your latency."

That is so not true for RAID1.

Re:typical?

[egburr]

I use RAID1 because I'm much more concerned about loss of data than about performance. Yeah, that means I buy two drives for the space of one, but for my personal data, it's worth it.

Really, if you need that much storage, I would hope your hardware budget is a little bigger than what I allocate for my stuff at home.

Re:typical?

[adamgolding]

thanks for the informative post, but i'm wondering, how do your advice apply to a) recording digital audio b) sampling (i.e. running gigastudio) i'm guessing throughput is rather important for both?

Re:typical?

[Rei]

It depends on what sort of bandwidth you're talking about. Audio isn't nearly so throughput intensive as video. Plus, you're talking about writes, not reads.

Raid 0: Not quite double the read and write throughput; somewhat higher latency, but not usually a relevant amount. No redundancy.

Raid 1: Not quite double the throughput; slightly lower latency, but usually not a relevant amount. Redundant.

Raid 5: Very fast read throughput; lowered write throughput; higher latency. Redundant.

Re:typical?

[Rei]

That's nice that your friends think that. It's not true, but it's good that they're subject to the placebo affect (in this case, the "ricer" effect: if you think it should be fast, it is!).

Stop and think for a second of how RAID 0 works. There is only one copy of each piece of data. It is spread across multiple disks. If you want to read a file, *each* drive has to seek to their respective blocks. Then they can read and return the data (and the data gets returned twice as fast).

For the data to get back, you have to wait for both drives to seek. The seek times, naturally, are hardware-limited; being in a raid isn't going to make the heads move any faster than they're physically capable of, or get you a higher RPM. To get your file back, then, you must wait for the maximum of the seek times of your disk, and then wait for them to read their blocks (generally relatively insigificant time by comparison for small files).

It doesn't matter what they think: physics and the algorithm used for RAID 0 dictates that their system will at best be the same speed with regard to latency, and more realistically, slower. Their giant video collections will copy at breakneck speeds, but their system-file performance will be little improved.

Re:typical?

[elbarono]

"RAID, if anything, will increase your latency."

Sorry, but you don't know what the fuck you're talking about. Please stop posting here until you get a clue.

Re:typical?

[MasTRE]

> If you want a high performance system, spend the money to get a small, top-of-the-line drive for your root partition (15k rpm SCSIs are nice, if you have a scsi card - you can get a 9 gig for 30$ including shipping, an 18 gig for 55$), and then put all of your space-consuming files (movies, music, etc) on your cheap bulk storage. Get enough spare ram to have good disk caching. And, of course, choose a good filesystem for small files - ReiserFS works well for me, but there are a lot of good options.

This looks good on paper, but in reality it's a big waste of money. A 15k RPM drive will do nothing measurable for you on the desktop.

A possible solution is to use separate drives (not partitions) for different tasks. For example, one for boot (as you pointed out), one for video editing, etc. Like the oft-ignored recommendation Photoshop makes to not put its swap on the same partition, neither shall you create race conditions.

Again, a 15K SCSI drive will do absolutely nothing to solve this problem, and neither will a drive that is twice as fast in all respects than today's fastest drive.

Re:typical?

[f0rt0r]

I haven't tried Reiser, but I use an old ( 1999! ) 13GB IDE drive for boot, and 6 400GB IDE drives ( each primary on its own controller ) as a RAID5 set created with mdadm and the xfs file system. I did run this setup with two drives per IDE bus, but it wasn't very fast. Transfers over the 1GB ethernet connection were about 4.6-5MBbps with the old setup, with the current setup I get between 11 and 20MBps, a nice speed increase.

File usage varies, but since I push/pull DVD images over the wire from the RAID set, I felt XFS would be the best, and RAID5 is worth it because I have had a drive go 'wonky' on me. Rebuilding it using mdadm utilities was a snap. It did cost me downtime for the rebuild as I don't have hot-swap capability. :(

Re:typical?

[Pieroxy]

Trolling isn't going to help either.

Re:typical?

[versus]

Raid 1: Not quite double the throughput; slightly lower latency, but usually not a relevant amount. Redundant.

Correction: Not quite double the READ throughput, slightly lower WRITE throughput

Re:typical?

[MrArmyAnt]

With that 16mb cache 300GB SATA Maxtor drive at $180, this is pointless. Large sized arrays are nothing now, why bother? Oh wait, were geeks, thats why! Thats why I have more invested in a computer than a car! ~MrArmyAnt http://www.modlife.net/

Now *thats* redundant.

[FireballX301]

The Poor Man's Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks.

That aside, a decent motherboard will come with a RAID IDE controller, so you could easily just grab a pair of 250 WD caviars. Or go the cheapo route and do maxtor.

Re:Now *thats* redundant.

[James Cape]

Actually, for RAID 5 you'd need a minimum of 3 drives.

http://www.acnc.com/04_01_05.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redundant_array_of_in dependent_disks

Re:Now *thats* redundant.

[chrismcdirty]

I always do the cheapo route and do maxtor, anyway. Every WD drive I've ever owned has failed me.

Re:Now *thats* redundant.

[Anonymous Coward]

You are really better off just using software raid as provided by the operating system than using the fake raid provided by those on board ide/sata raid controllers. Then if your mobo dies you don't have to find one with the same raid chipset, worry about proprietary drivers etc. You just get another mobo and everything works fine. I played around with the nvraid, the silicon image raid, and one other brand, and they all pretty much suck. The best part is that without a special driver it doesn't matter how you configure the devices in the raid bios, they show up to the OS as individual drives not as a raid drive.

Re:Now *thats* redundant.

[ankarbass]

The Poor Man's Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks.

You forgort the extra array.The Poor Man's RAID Array becomes:

The Poor Man's Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks Array! ...brought to you by the department of redundancy department...

Re:Now *thats* redundant.

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

ABIT KV8Pro with a pair of 74 gig Raptors in RAID 0. My friend with the Alienware is jealous.

Re:Now *thats* redundant.

[jpaz]

I've always had good luck with Maxtor drives, and terrible luck with Western Digital.

That said, I have a friend who's had the *exact opposite* luck. His Maxtor drives have all died, and he swears by WD.

I would have to say that most drives are about equal. Ultimately, it's all luck.

Re:Now *thats* redundant.

[toddestan]

Buy Seagate. Some people swear by them, others think they are OK. But I don't know anyone who hates them. (...now watch all the Seagate haters come out of the woodwork)

I've also had good luck with Samsung, though I believe their biggest drive is only 160GB.

Re:Now *thats* redundant.

[Anonymous Coward]

the problem is that most ide/ sata raid controls are like win modems. They push out alot of the processing out to the main cpu rather than doing it on the raid card it's self.

while there are drivers for linux (the fake raid driver) for these I would recomend going with the Linux software raid as it is alot more mature we have had a few failures with the fake raid driver..

Re:Now *thats* redundant.

[rpozz]

If you set up both entire drives as a software raid array under Linux, with exactly the same parameters as in the motherboard raid, and use the Linux mdpart patch (2.6.6 or later, do NOT use 2.6.5 or below), you can get Linux and Windows to share the same array.

Getting it to boot is a bit of a bitch though. You need to use a ramdisk and experiment with LILO an awful lot. LILO also won't work with anything other RAID1 for obvious reasons

Re:Now *thats* redundant.

[Anonymous Luddite]

>> Then if your mobo dies you don't have to find one with the same raid chipset, worry about proprietary drivers etc

umm, if you're smart enough to set up raid, you will do backups won't you?

Re:Now *thats* redundant.

[JabberWokky]

How exactly do you do RAID 5 with a pair of drives?

--
Evan

Re:Now *thats* redundant.

[Slack3r78]

That's exactly my experience. My family owns a PC shop, and we stopped buying WD drives around the time of their 30-60GBs because we were getting way too many failures - many DOAs and, worse still, drives that were failing a few weeks after being sold.

We've been selling pretty much exclusively Samsung and Seagate since then. The other *huge* often unmentioned advantage is that they're both much quieter than WD and Maxtor equivalents - Samsung being a little quieter in my experience.

Really, outside of the Raptor line, I see no compelling reason to buy a WD drive. I can definitely agree with the sentiment that I have *never* heard anyone say they hated Seagate drives, especially if you talk to the SCSI freaks out there. :-)

Re:Now *thats* redundant.

[InvalidError]

So far, I have two (out of two) failed HDDs from Quantum, one failure and one oddly behaving drive (erratic performance) from Maxtor, none from WD and Seagate, though my only Seagate drive (2.1GB 4500RPM) sounds like a lawn mower - I was certain it would fail but it annoyingly hummed along 24/7 until I retired the PC in which it was 5+ years later.

Thankfully, all four failures occured under warranty. Also, failure in the three total failures was progressive: after each restart, I could copy some (decreasing) amount of data before drive lock-up, usually enough for me to recover my most important files before total failure.

Well, I might have a failed Seagate drive... but I do not have a matching PCI ESDI controller card to test it with.

Re:Now *thats* redundant.

[Feyr]

unless the drivers improved a LOT, most (all?) RAID IDE controllers are unsupported in linux. since the raid is really all done in software, developpers see no reason to code a raid for every drivers, instead they point you to the MD driver.

at the same time, the MD driver is faster than the cheapo drivers. or so they said last time i had one

Re:Now *thats* redundant.

[mollymoo]

You can RAID partitions as well as drives. Of course it would be entirely pointless to partition two drives then RAID 5 the partitions, but not impossible.

Re:Now *thats* redundant.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm... technically I don't see how this could be moderated redundant. I mean, offtopic would be more correct, just not as poetic. I guess if someone were to rate it -1 redundant followed up by +1 underrated, and then maybe someone threw a +1 funny in there...

Re:Now *thats* redundant.

[megarich]

That's what I did with my new machine. My new motherboard has a raid controller on it and I obtained 2 cheap sata hard drives for it. I don't care much about performance, I just wanted a back up incase one of the disks decides to die......

Re:Now *thats* redundant.

[OrangeTide]

I hate Seagate. The are an untrustworthy company with an inferior product. Hitachi or WD is good. Maxtor is okay, but they sometimes have quality control issues. (luckily their drive usually fail with in a few weeks if they do have a quality problem). Storage Review is always a good place to go to get less biased information. Especially on specific drive models (which is what really matters when you are buying drives).

Re:Now *thats* redundant.

[paulsomm]

" Actually, for RAID 5 you'd need a minimum of 3 drives."

Yes. And for RAID 1 (mirroring) you only need two, which I believe is what the person meant when suggesting "a decent motherboard will come with a RAID IDE controller, so you could easily just grab a pair of 250 WD caviars"

Re:Now *thats* redundant.

[sorphin]

Never heard a complaint eh? Try anyone that used their "Medalist" series.. biggest pile of dog crap they ever made.. Personally, I never had any failures w/ WD, maxtors.. well.. let's say my 60 gig drives like to Clunk-Clunk periodically... I will however, say, that the 200G Barracudas are excellent, and generally the seagate Barracudas and Cheetahs are where they speend the most R&D $ to make the drive work well.

Re:Now *thats* redundant.

[EvanED]

And actually, every onboard RAID chip I've seen only does RAID 0, 1, and maybe 0+1.

Granted, I haven't looked for a couple years, but I doubt things have changed.

Re:Now *thats* redundant.

[facelessnumber]

I've rarely seen a Seagate SCSI disk fail.

IDE, though... Oh, yeah. A few years ago the company I worked for sold an assload of AOpen boxes with 10GB Seagate IDE drives to a bunch of schools all over the state. The failure rate on those things was astounding. It got to the point where service calls were costing so much time and money that we were replacing those drives preemptively because we knew we'd be out there again in a month or two because five more had spun out their bearings or started the inevitable death rattle. I once replaced 30 of those things in a single day. These were the drives that had some kind of rubber sleeve around them. It was a long time before I'd trust any data I cared about on a Seagate drive. I used to replace a lot of a particular model IBM Deathsar at the time too.

After that I'd only buy WD disks, but lately the trend at my office seems to be WD 20's and 40's dropping like flies right after the warranty goes out. I'm replacing them with Maxtors, which I'm having much better luck with these days. Eventually though, I'm sure Maxtor will make a certain drive that dies easily, I'll get stuck with a whole bunch of them, and find something else that I think is reliable for a while.

I guess the moral of this sleep-deprived diatribe is that different manufacturers' drives suck more at different times than others' do.

Re:Now *thats* redundant.

[JabberWokky]

Heh. That's true - both the "you can" and the "entirely pointless".

Reminds me of my idea to burn a series of CD ISOs that are images of a RAID 5 system onto a single DVD. The drive would have to seek all over the disc to pull each byte. Hehehehe.

--
Evan

Re:Now *thats* redundant.

[aliquis]

Most of my friends in the warez business seems happy with WD drives, and they should know.
I have two 80GB special edition 8MB drives which I have had for 2.5 years, no troubles. But sure, they do sound a bit, don't know if that's true for the newer drives however.
Don't know about the quality of Samsung drives, but the last modell is fast and all are quiet and cool.
Seagate is good of course :)

Re:Now *thats* redundant.

[unitron]

I'm sure that Seagate puts out the occasional clunker just like everyone else, but I suspect that a lot of any bad reputation they might have earned came from re-badged Conner drives. If your Seagate has a big old raised "C" on the top metal cover, it didn't really start life as a Seagate.

Re:Now *thats* redundant.

[blackicye]

After losing 80GB of data to a pair of 2 week old IBM Deathstar 75GXPs, I switched to Maxtor.

I personally haven't had any problems with Maxtor drives so far. Over the last 3 years I've bought 18 Maxtor PATA and SATA drives both OEM as well as retail boxed(from 40GB - 200GB.)

None have failed yet *knock on wood*
Seeing as how I haven't had any problems with Maxtor, and that they are among the cheapest on the market, and perform admirably. I will most likely continue to buy Maxtor drives only.

With regards to the "Poor Mans Raid Array" good luck getting 14x 50GB SCSI2 drives for $70.00

Shipping on that lot of drives must've been scary, and you've got to wonder at the MTBF of a lot of obsolete bulk harddrives you've bought off ebay.

I wonder if the Seagate 5 year warranty applies to these. Maybe its just me but spending more money on a rackmount casing than on the drives for your power hungry 0.5TB RAID 5 Array just gives me the willies.

Re:Now *thats* redundant.

[RWerp]

My Seagate drive failed recently. Of course, it proves nothing.

Re:Now *thats* redundant.

[RWerp]

One WD 1.6GB drive I bought in 1996 is still working well in my mother's PC. Any comments?

Re:Now *thats* redundant.

[RWerp]

I used to replace a lot of a particular model IBM Deathsar at the time too.

Was it by any chance an IBM DTLA ca. 30GB model, assembled in Romania?

Re:Now *thats* redundant.

[MagnusDredd]

I'll second that...

Not only have I personally had a lot of Western Digital drives fail, but I've come across a disproportionate number of them professionally. This includes WD drives built during the last 5 or 6 years, except for the Raptor series (of which I have seen no failures).

Maxtor had a seriously bad run about umm, 8 years ago, or at the time 8GB drives were considered large. Quantum made quite a few terrible drives at about the same time. Actually since then I've avoided Quantum as much as possible, and have not come across them in any number in years. And Conner, thank God they're gone...

I have come across failures in other vendors in recent years, but in much smaller percentages.

Re:Now *thats* redundant.

[flieghund]

I have a 17 GB WD Caviar HDD that I bought in 1998. I have since re-used it in 3 separate custom-built computers while five other HDDs (3 WD and 2 Maxtor) have up and died, including a rather unfortunate 100-day lifespan of a 3-month-warranty WD drive.

Moral of the Story #1: They don't make HDDs like they used to.

Moral of the Story #2: Don't buy a HDD with a 3-month warranty. Splurge and spend the extra $$$ for the 3-year warranty "special edition" drives.

Re:Now *thats* redundant.

[RWerp]

I used to think 3-month warranty is on used products. At least where I live, you get at least 1 year, or 33 months on HDD's in particular.

W/r to moral #1, this HDD of mine has much lower RPM value than modern drives. Maybe this is the reason...

Re:Now *thats* redundant.

[Anonymous Coward]

>Maxtor had a seriously bad run about umm, 8 years ago, or at the time 8GB drives were considered large. Quantum made quite a few terrible drives at about the same time. Actually since then I've avoided Quantum as much as possible, and have not come across them in any number in years. And Conner, thank God they're gone...

Maxtor bought Quantum. Also, Seagate bought Connor. (Which is somewhat ironic, since Mr. Connor left Seagate to found Connor.)

I think every manufacturer had a bad run at one time or another (including Seagate), but they all seem to be "pretty good" now.

Re:Now *thats* redundant.

[runderwo]

Seagate offers a 5yr warranty on new drives. Samsung offers 3 years. Maxtor, WD offer 1 year. What message does that send?

Howto

[zabagel]

Possible new Slashdot Category?

Re:Howto

[Compu486]

Absolutely a new one! I agree that should be a new one!

Re:Howto

[ArmorFiend]

Agree here as well.
Foodstuff commanders take note!

Re:Howto

[Anonymous Coward]

redundant

Re:Howto

[ToasterofDOOM]

Huzzah!

Re:Howto

[Keetorca]

I Like that idea too

Re:Howto

[facelessnumber]

Fo' shizzle.

Re:Howto

[unitron]

Yeah, but the "How Not To" category has much more comic potential.

/. on budget:

[roman_mir]

Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.

Re:/. on budget:

[Seigen]

Raid is not that exciting unless your maintaining a critical server for the internet or something. You also have to deal with the mess of having the drives _have_ to remain in that configuration for the data to be read. Personally, I would rather have the convienience of separate drives, and just make backups. Some old parts could make a backup server. All it really needs is a big drive. You can even unplug it for safety if you want.

Or for that matter you could use dvd-r's...

!uargh!

[Anonymous Coward]

poor enough cannot afford the disks

Cool? Naah, old

[riflemann]

I seriously doubt that this is cool nowadays. A huge case, a lot of fans and the heat it generates isn't something in anyway impressive nowadays.

It takes just TWO modern disks to get 1/2 terabyte of space, and not much more ot get them in raid5, plus you can have a compact box (the one in TFA is very boxy and ugly) and a lot less noise and power consumption.

Not impressive. Sorry.

Re:Cool? Naah, old

[Compu486]

You need to learn to read! 2 of these makes a full terabyte! And the artical is funny as hell!

Re:Cool? Naah, old

[Anonymous Coward]

and a lot less noise and power consumption.

You'll also much less redundancy.

Re:Cool? Naah, old

[Nogami_Saeko]

I'd be somewhat more impressed if all of those drives he put in the system were in the 200-400gb range...

I know he got the drives on the cheap and all, but still... I've got nearly 1tb in my desktop machine without all the extra work.

N.

Re:Cool? Naah, old

[TheGavster]

Actually, Maxtor now has a single-drive 500GB solution. However, both a pair of 250GB disks or a 500GB disk will cost more than twice what this array cost the guy to build (including power, case, and controller). $0.50/GB is a pretty decent rate (though he did get some decent deals on some of the eBay parts)

Re:Cool? Naah, old

[ToasterofDOOM]

Not impressive??? Think of all the money you could save on heaing in the winter!

Re:Cool? Naah, old

[anthony_dipierro]

However, both a pair of 250GB disks or a 500GB disk will cost more than twice what this array cost the guy to build (including power, case, and controller).

Go to pricewatch. You can get a 400 gig for $244. A little bit smaller, but slightly less expensive. If you want 2x250 gigs you can get it for about $200. The hard drive companies have started a price war recently, and it's probably going to last a while.

Re:Cool? Naah, old

[anthony_dipierro]

Yeah, but it would be much more impressive if it used water cooling and piped the hot water to your hot water heater. But I guess I only say this because I live in Florida, rarely pay for heating, but still have to pay for hot water all year.

Re:Cool? Naah, old

[ZorinLynx]

Uhh, it'd be worse. You're more likely to have a double drive failure out of ten drives than three.

And a double failure is all it takes to take out a RAID5.

-Z

Re:Cool? Naah, old

[mollymoo]

Absolutely, because heating your home with electricity is by far the cheapest way. Or not.

Re:Cool? Naah, old

[Jedi Alec]

awww, come on, electricity is only 4 times more expensive per Joule when compared to gas(over here in Holland anyway), I mean, that's peanuts, right? :P

Re:Cool? Naah, old

[aliquis]

500GB raid5 array for $250 is impressive, would cost much more here, using 14 disks might not be the best option but that haven't got as much to do with it at all.

Not a big deal.

[Seumas]

Okay, half a terabyte? Hardly worth lifting a finger for. I have more than 2.5 terabytes almost entirely of porn. And not only that, but it's all stored on 20 IDE drives of various sizes, in external USB cases, plugged into three 7-port D-Link USB hubs, plugged into a PC.

That's a lot of storage.

That's balls-to-the-wall.

I'll take a picture of all the drives stacked up on one another on the desk (5 rows, 4 drives tall).

I take my porn seriously.

Re:Not a big deal.

[Anonymous Coward]

2.5 TB of porn ! You must have really big arms, I guess.

Re:Not a big deal.

[Seumas]

Who marked this "Funny"?

I'm serious. And it shoudl be "Informative", you insensitive clods!

Re:Not a big deal.

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

You're the California Pimp?

Re:Not a big deal.

[MustardMan]

I'll take a picture of all the drives stacked up on one another on the desk (5 rows, 4 drives tall).

With that much porn, I think the last picture /. geeks want to see is of the drives

Re:Not a big deal.

[Universal Indicator]

Probably only one or the other.

Re:Not a big deal.

[artifex2004]

I'm serious. And it shoudl be "Informative", you insensitive clods!

He's telling the truth! I won't tell you how I know, but... he's using an insufficiently patched Windows XP. :)

Re:Not a big deal.

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a sick man and you need help ;-)

Re:Not a big deal.

[Seumas]

I certainly do. Organizing 2.5 terrabytes of porn is a bitch. It's like "Hm... does this go in midgets or does it go in animals->poultry -- or should I create an entirely new midget and poultry sub-category?".

Worse, all of the "media catalogue" programs for Windows crash before they finish cataloguing my collection. I even tried it with iView Media Pro on my Mac and that crashed, too after about a terabyte.

This is a serious issue that, as time goes on, I believe Google will need to address. Maybe some sort of specialized Spoogle porn-search appliance?

Do you feel lucky today? - You bet I do. Spank spank!

Re:Not a big deal.

[Anonymous Coward]

You categorise your porn? I found that rather than struggling working which video covers which category or using a database, It's most effective to use a script which plays a random porno through mplayer for when you fancy a wank.

Many of us would like to know: how did you get all that porn? Do you use a P2P script, or do you just download every porn torrent that you see posted?

Re:Not a big deal.

[secolactico]

I certainly do. Organizing 2.5 terrabytes of porn is a bitch. It's like "Hm... does this go in midgets or does it go in animals->poultry -- or should I create an entirely new midget and poultry sub-category?".

What you need is a gmail-like system. All the files go into a single pool and apply labels to each. Then simply organize them in "searchs" like gmail and Outlook 2003. So the same file would be in "midgets" "bestiality" "strapon" and "poultry", but it would only be a single file!

And you could define more complex searches... "Today i feel like... pirate themed male on shemale gangbangs".

Anybody knows of such an organizing system?

Re:Not a big deal.

[Cymage]

Obligitory Penny Arcade strip

Re:Not a big deal.

[Anonymous Coward]

>but it's all stored on 20 IDE drives of various sizes

With so much porn stored on these drives, it gives a new meaning to the term HARD drive.

Re:Not a big deal.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/spotlight/

Re:Not a big deal.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have more than 2.5 terabytes almost entirely of porn. And not only that, but it's all stored on 20 IDE drives of various sizes, in external USB cases, plugged into three 7-port D-Link USB hubs, plugged into a PC.

No words...should have sent...a poet.

Re:Not a big deal.

[zerocool^]

I think your priorities are out of whack.

Re:Not a big deal.

[EvanED]

No, see, that many drives IS porn to us.

Re:Not a big deal.

[Bishop923]

That's balls-to-the-wall.

So you're Into BDSM eh?

Re:Not a big deal.

[Anubis350]

heh, I know a guy who could use this array for just that :-P. There is a guy at my school who shares on our DirectConnect network 650GBs of porn. A few friends of mine and I once calculated that at standard dvd --> divx codec compression it was somewhere around 4 years of porn...

Re:Not a big deal.

[poopdeville]

PostgreSQL, Perl, and Apache.

Should be pretty straight forward, but dicking around with the metadata might be an incredible pain.

Re:Not a big deal.

[tomkagai]

Would you say that if you knew he was gay? I would, but you might not. Be careful of what you assume.

Re:Not a big deal.

[Zeneris]

You want to seriously worry about heat with that many drives so close together, especially if they are IBM or Hitachi drives (I HATE THEM SO ARGGG!!!!) Me I'm running RAID 0+1 with four 300GB Seagate 7200.8 SATA, quiet, fast, cool and SAFE, because an October 2004 250GB Hitachi 7K250 SATA BOOT drive was completely trashed early this year (at under 40C temp), data recovery pro. said no hope of data recovery!

Only reason it's 'budget'

[OverlordQ]

Only reason it's budget is because they bought drives off eBay . . . personally . . I think I'll skip eBay if I'm buying Drives.

Re:Only reason it's 'budget'

[Anonymous Coward]

But the ebay drives are probably pre-filled with interesting data

Re:Only reason it's 'budget'

[toddestan]

On the other hand, if you are building a big RAID array, you can probably deal with a few drives failing. $70 for fourteen 50.1GB drives is a hell of a deal, though if I was him I'd try to get a few more of them so he can deal with failures when they crop up.

Re:Only reason it's 'budget'

[kalleguld]

hey, maybe you'll get some kinky pics, secret docs or something. Stuff like that is always fun :)

What am I missing here?

[Anonymous Luddite]

That seems like a lot of screwing around.

Why not just hang a four *large* drives in a workstation with MB that does RAID 1+0? Yeah, it'll cost more than 249, but it won't involve a 50 lbs box of drives..

Re:What am I missing here?

[md10md]

This is slashdot. Why use a piddling RAID 1+0 when you can use a manly RAID 5?

Re:What am I missing here?

[Anonymous Luddite]

>> manly RAID 5?

Yeah, really I'd prefer raid 5 too, but TFA was about a "poor mans" raid array.

More or less on-topic: take a look at this guy's really pointless raid 5 setup. Very cool.

Re:What am I missing here?

[name773]

that's great :)

Re:What am I missing here?

[zerocool^]

I just spent like an hour working the numbers out.

On pricewatch, I found a vendor selling 160GB Maxtor HDDs new for $69.

6 drives seems to lend its self to optimal price vs. size vs. redundancy.

6 x $69 = $414

Now, I am going to go for a RAID-5 array, with one hot spare. So, 4 disks of data, one for parity, and one for a hot spare:

4 x 160GB = 640GB

Take whatever you've got laying around the house (I know I have a 600 Mhz celeron doing nothing, which probably can serve as a file server... may want something faster, I think I have a P-III 800Mhz hanging around.) I also have a Promise Ultra-TX2 somewhere 'round here. It's very common - I think it came free with a 40GB hard drive sometime ago. Ask a friend if you don't have one.
You'll also need an OS drive, but I'm sure I have a 20 GB drive here somewhere...

You may need to buy a new case. Antec has a real nice full tower case that comes with 6 3.5" bays and a 500 watt power supply for about $115.

Install linux on the OS drive, then make sure you have md in the kernel. fdisk all the 160's and set them to partition type "fd (linux raid auto-detect)" Configure your /etc/raidtab:

raiddev /dev/md0
raid-level 5

nr-raid-disks 5
nr-spare-disks 1
persistent-superblock 1
chunk-size 32
parity-algorithm right-symmetric
device /dev/hdb1
raid-disk 0
device /dev/hdc1
raid-disk 1
device /dev/hdd1
raid-disk 2
device /dev/hde1
raid-disk 3
device /dev/hdf1
raid-disk 4
device /dev/hdg1
spare-disk 0

modeprobe md, make sure it's loaded, then:
cd /dev; MAKEDEV md
mkraid /dev/md0
make sure it's done syncing (use cat /proc/mdstat - or make a script: while true; do clear; cat /proc/mdstat; done) then mke2fs -j /dev/md0 (or if you want to share to windows boxen, format accordingly).

So, $115 + $415 = $530 (plus spare parts and time) for a 640GB raid array with redundancy and a hot spare. You can get a cool 800GB if you don't need the hot spare (but it's pretty nerd-cool).

If you up the ante to 10 drives, you can have a 1TB array (1120GB) with one parity and two hot-spares, for a cost of under $700, extra ATA card notwithstanding.

~Will

Re:What am I missing here?

[cpthowdy]

I wouldn't waste a 2nd hot spare in a RAID5 system... A simultaneous disk failure will still bring the whole system down, as there obviously isn't enough time for the array to rebuild on the first hot spare.

Useful?

[jazzman251]

What would somebody with only $250 to spend on a .5tb raid have to fill it with?

Re:Useful?

[name773]

il^H^Hlegally acquired multimedia files. what else?

Re:Useful?

[anthony_dipierro]

Spam, of course.

Seriously though, there is way more than 500 gigs of free content (including source code) available on the web. If you've got a DSL connection or faster, you can easily fill up half a terabyte.

Re:Well, it's not without its problems

[MustardMan]

Interesting? Insightful? This is a direct copy and paste from TFA.

Redundant Redundancy

[btgreat]

Does the fact that so many hard drives are used in this setup detract from its usefulness in that with more drives, the chances of one failing are that much higher?

I personally would use two large drives that will work on any system, and although there is little protection in case of one of the drives failing, the chances are far less than if I had been using as many drives as were used in this setup. It seems this setup is trying to solve a problem made far worse in its design than it would be using two standard drives.

However, this wouldn't be the first idea of its kind on slashdot by a longshot.

Re:Redundant Redundancy

[Compu486]

Well if you look at the life span of the current generic consumer drives and then do some detail hunting on these you will find that the drives are far superior that he used. Good for 40 years of constant use. So no... your more likely to have a cheep western digital 40BG die before these drives.

Re:Redundant Redundancy

[Pusene]

Yes, actually. The main reason for harddrives to fail is heat. This many SCSI drives generate massive amounts of heat, and when one fail the rest have to work harder...more heat and greater risk of another one failong. On a another not if the mean time before failure is 10 years with one disk, the chance of one disk failing in this setup is 10/16 = 7.5 months. Given the heat problem, I wouldn't bet pennies for dollars for this to last a full year.

my attempt at RAID...

[darthpenguin]

This is a bit off-topic, but I want to share my most recent experience with linux-raid

A few months ago, I decided I'd put together a RAID5 system in a dedicated box, to be used as network storage. I put together a Duron 1.6 on an ECS (I know!) K7VTA3, 512mb RAM, a Promise IDE controller, and 4 200GB drives. I figured the kernel-based software raid would be fine for my purposes.

I installed linux to a normal partition, then set up the RAID array. Everything seemed fine. I set up samba/nfs shares and ftp. Files seemed to transfer just fine. But for some reason, if I transfered a large file over the network directly to the RAID, the md5sum would have changed, no matter how I transfered it. To make things even more strange, if I transferred to a non-RAID partition, then directly used mv or cp to place it on the RAID partition, it worked great. Strange.

I never quite figured it out what was wrong, and I scrapped the project, with the intention to try again with some more decent hardware. Any ideas as to what happened?

Re:my attempt at RAID...

[Anonymous Coward]

My only guess is that you used a via chipset instead of a sis or nforce to do this.
Actually sis beats out nforce on pci bus and ide throughput hands down on the athlonxp platform.

Been there done this tons of times.
I currently have a tyan tiger mp board with a fasttrak 100 & 4 120GB maxtor drives in software raid 5, It's about 40% full or so and I've had zero problems with it. The whole system is underclocked EXCEPT the hard drives (wish I could underclock those).

Re:my attempt at RAID...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, that was because I was haxxoring y0ur g1bs0|\|

Re:my attempt at RAID...

[PygmySurfer]

My guess is it was the piece of shit Promise IDE controller. I'm convinced those things eat drives, amongst other nastiness.

Re:my attempt at RAID...

[FireBug]

Yes! I mean NO! ...

I too have this same exact problem and haven't been able to figure out what causes it. The array in question is a 1.6TB software RAID5 array with eight 250GB Maxtor SATA drives on Promise SATA150 TX4 controllers. A few months ago I noticed files that I'd coppied via samba being corrupted once they got to the array. As such I now checksum every file that I dump on it before copying from my windows box. I would say somwhere between 1/5 and 1/10 of the large (350MB+) files I copy to it get corrupted. If I copy them again, the MD5s are different, and usually the second copy gives me the same checksum.

Things I've noticed:

• swapped out switches, network cables, and ethernet cards with no change
• occurs going from my Windows box to the RAID array with Samba, generic FTP, and even scp
• only seems to occur when copying to the RAID array, not when copying to the non-RAID system disk on the same server
• happened with both an old Abit BE6 and with a newer Intel L440GX motherboard - I don't think the chipsets have anything to do with it
• pretty sure it only happens between my windows box and the linux server, never from another box (which includes Linux, FreeBSD, and OSX)
• only happens when I copy to the RAID array, reads seem to work flawlessly
• strangely this only seems to occur with .avi files - I can't recall having any other types of files become corrupted but as a disclaimer 95% of the things being coppied to this server are AVIs

I've no idea what causes this, and as far as I know it only started happening somewhat recently (I've had the array for many years, although not always a full 1.6TB in size). Maybe it started when SP2 came out, I don't know. I can't 100% confirm I haven't always had this problem, but I've only noticed it starting a matter of months ago. Anyone else out there have any ideas? I'm at a loss. The Promise TX4s are what I'm currently eyeing as the problem source.

FYI: I'm using mdadm 1.11.0, ReiserFS 3.6.19, and a chunk size of 128k with left-symmetric parity.

Re:my attempt at RAID...

[Anonymous Coward]

You do realize that mdadm 1.11 is unstable?

1.8 was the last stable version.

Re:my attempt at RAID...

[FireBug]

What makes you say 1.8 was the last stable version? I've never seen any complaints with the newer 1.x series releases, and I just noticed that 1.12.0 has been released by Neil Brown.

Besides, and I may be completely off here, doesn't mdadm only create/manage RAID arrays? I thought all the code involved in the actual running of an array (including writing to one as any other block device) was in the Linux kernel. Please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

Re:my attempt at RAID...

[SacredNaCl]

I read your post, and my opinion is: Your particular problem is probably power supply related, and if not that memory related. Digital stuff is "always right" (cough) it never makes mistakes (cough) it makes perfect copies (cough), it uses an invertor as a filter of sorts, high voltage goes here (1) low voltage goes here (0) and this is sufficent to deal with noise and keep ir error free most of the time, the problem is what happens when you get voltages inbetween and in an even mildly overstressed power supply this situation is quite frequent. Most people are overstressing their power supplies, yes, it runs, but it tends to lead to data corruption. The other culprit (though far less likely) is possibly ram. ...Even with good hardware...When you move large amounts of data around you have to be prepared for and expect some corruption, we need mv commands that actually check that what they are writing is what was there. The systems to copy we use now are so primitive they will even allow wrong file sizes and complete the operation without generating an error message. This is not good at all. (At least Windows & the versions of Linux I've used will).
I realize this uses quite a few CPU cycles to check hashes when you copy and move files around, but this is an era where dual cores are coming to the desktop, processors are over 2Ghz (many over 3Ghz), and its not like manufacturers couldn't add this feature in hardware as well to take load off of the CPU. This kind of checking should be built into the OS, and if not automatic, should at least be an option that the user could turn on.

Anyone dealing with very large amounts of data has already delt with this, and hopefully found a workable solution for their needs. Now its just up to the OS vendors, and hardware makers to bring data integrity to the masses.

Re:my attempt at RAID...

[agurkan]

Something similar happened on a system I was administrating, and it was because of faulty memory. I tested with memtest86 and found that there was a subtle defect in the motherboard memory chip configuration.

Re:my attempt at RAID...

[FireBug]

I too thought it might be a power supply issue as I've dealt enough with "flakey" computers to know most people's power supplies are sub-par and often problematic.

Originally I had an Antec True480 in the machine along with a 3Ware 5800 for RAID1 on two system disks. For whatever reason, that Antec supply would run very low on the 5V rail and the system would randomly crash/reboot once or twice in a 2-3 month period (took me a while to realize the 5V was really low). I had a similar problem with a different motherboard (AMD based) and an Antec True430 with a different 3Ware 5800 where the 3Ware would not even recognize both drives all the time when the 5V rail was low (4.5-4.6V). I think the problem was more with the Antec supplies in those cases.

Right now I have an Enermax EG651P-VE FM(24P) 550W supply in the machine and all the voltages are dead on. I realize that me testing the voltages with a cheap-o digital multimeter from Radio Shack isn't exactly a 100% guaranteed test, but I'd consider that Enermax a relatively good supply and in theory capable of easily powering 9 drives (one system) and a dual P3 600Mhz.

As for memory, the system does not have ECC memory (if that even really helps) but all three sticks are Crucial PC100 CL2 modules and have passed that Memtest 86 program running overnight (only 2-3 passes). Again, I don't think that memory test is a 100% guarantee, but it definitely makes me think other things are up.

I may try running the thing with two supplies here in a bit (I've done that often enough on other machines - run drives off one supply and everything else off another). I may also swap in some other power supplies I have lying around just to be sure.

Thanks for your comments!

Re:my attempt at RAID...

[darthpenguin]

I suspected that as well, but I have a stick of Corsair installed, and I tested the hell out of it with memtest86, with no issues found. Like another poster said, I think it's the Promise IDE controller.

Re:Well, it's not without its problems

[chrismcdirty]

It's amazing that you can copy and paste right from the end of the article. Almost seems like you have an opinion in the matter, doesn't it?

This is why web servers crash...

[Anonymous Coward]

I always wondered how those 5 dollar a month web hosting companies kept their bottom line down. Looks like porno man and him should get together and make some real cash moneys.

Ich bean impressed

Written for the nerds

[parasonic]

"What self-respecting geek doesn't get the warm fuzzies at the mere mention of the RAID."

Yep. exactly. Because RAID equates with large and secure storage availability which equates with porn which equates with the best that any "self-respecting geek" (the target audience) will ever get.

Ridiculous

[tabdelgawad]

This project looks like a giant, hot, slow, old-tech, loud, power-hog of a 500 Gig 'drive' for $250 (low-ball estimate with all the eBay pricing and special batch price on the drives the author got, and not counting time/labor).

A 400 Gig drive (probably of equal or better reliability overall and a warranty) costs about $260 on newegg.

Reminds me of people using 486's as routers/firewalls when you can pick up a Linksys or D-Link for $20 or $30.

Thanks, but no thanks.

Re:Ridiculous

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, because the 486 properly setup with iptables has better throughput, is more stable and cheaper.

Thanks, but thanks!

Re:Ridiculous

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm happy with my 486 based firewall, even though it is loud, big and clunky.

Reason being, IPCop gives me a lot more options than a $30 router.

Sometimes linux makes sense.

Re:Ridiculous

[HermanAB]

Well, a 486 with Linux and IPtables has better throughput than the little ARM processor in a Linksys / Dlink and you can run a proxy filter, since you have a hard disk for the cache. There is just no comparison really.

Re:Ridiculous

[swimin]

My $30 router would die and need attention after every power outage. A 486 (in my case a 586) will happily reboot on its own.

Re:Ridiculous

[lawpoop]

"400 Gig drive (probably of equal or better reliability overall and a warranty).."

Not really. Most drives coming out now have a 1-year warranty (some have 3). Modern drives pack more data into a smaller space, so they are more likely to lose data than older drive. Small imperfections will be more noticeable, and will cause more and greater problems. They are not the quality level of the old seagate SCSI drives used in this setup. Those SCSI originally came with a 5-year warranty. If those SCSI drives are still alive and spinning, I would trust them to last longer than any crappy 1-year warranty IDE drive you can buy off the shelf these days.

Furthermore, think about this: What happens when your 400 GB drive dies? You lose all your data. Yes, you can get it replace, but so what? Your data is already gone. What happens when one of these 18.6 or 50 GB drives dies? Power down the machine, rip and replace the drive for $5 - $10, boot back up and mount the drive. No problem.

Bottom line, you need RAID 5 for data reliability. A single drive is a less reliable scenario. Those old SCSI drives are probably more reliable than any new 1-year warranty 400 GB IDE drive, and if one dies, who cares? This is a hardier scenario.

Re:Ridiculous

[Anonymous Coward]

The drives in the article are 10K rpm, I imagine they have much better seek times than any drives you would be getting of similar size and price.

Re:Ridiculous

[rpozz]

A 400 Gig drive (probably of equal or better reliability overall and a warranty) costs about $260 on newegg.

A 400GB drive isn't redundant, unlike the setup in the article, so if it fails, you've lost 400GB of data. The drives are SCSI, which means they will be incredibly reliable, and a lot more so than a consumer-grade SATA drive. I would accessing large files on that thing would be incredibly fast.

Reminds me of people using 486's as routers/firewalls when you can pick up a Linksys or D-Link for $20 or $30.

A 486 router/firewall can actually be cheaper than a Linksys/D-Link router, seeing as it isn't hard to pick them up for free. You also have an enormous amount of flexibility (for example traffic shaping) not found in a cheap router.

Re:Ridiculous

[Anonymous Coward]

A 400 Gig drive (probably of equal or better reliability overall and a warranty) costs about $260 on newegg.

I doubt you're going to get more reliability than this RAID array with a single $260 drive, and the speed difference will probably be tremendous. Any one of those Barracuda SCSI drives alone will be faster than a cheap IDE drive, with a 7.4ms seek time. RAID a bunch of them together, and it won't even be close.

Giant, hot, old-tech, loud, and power hungry, yes. Slow? I doubt it.

Re:Ridiculous

[Pandaemonium]

Especially when there are good implementations ready for you to drop right onto a box, like http://www.smoothwall.org/.

I have a Pentium 266 that hums in the background and firewalls my network with Smoothwall. I'm quite pleased with it.

Re:Ridiculous

[morgan_greywolf]

Hmm.... Well, a 486 with Linux and IPtables has better throughput than the little ARM processor in a Linksys / Dlink But those LinkSys/Dlink routers typically *are* Linux and iptables; the only difference is the processor and the bus.

Re:Ridiculous

[packetl0ss]

If they do run linux and iptables, why do they crash so much more often than a PC running Linux and iptables for the same tasks?

Re:Ridiculous

[HermanAB]

I have wondered about that myself - in order to make Linux run an an ARM using as little memory as possible, they have to optimise things and apparently Linksys isn't very good at it...

Re:Ridiculous

[Anonymous Coward]

Reminds me of people using 486's as routers/firewalls well, for one the 486 i used to use was as stripped down as they come, and was using pretty low voltage draw, at least compared to my 586/686 class machines. but yeah, you should really be using an old LAPTOP with the screen powered down since then you can get the wattage really really low, probabbly below that of a linksys/dlink.. in fact, i have a laptop that the screen is busted on, that would make a perfect firewall/router... except I already have a linksys, and so I don't need one.

Re:Ridiculous

[interiot]

Bottom line, you need RAID 5 for data reliability

That's a common misconception. RAID 5 will give you greater data reliability in some cases (sudden drive failure, RAID 5 will keep you from going down), but won't help you in many others (eg. accidental rm -rf /, someone rootkitting you just so they can spam people in Brazil (happened to me), accidentally running an SQL UPDATE command without a WHERE clause (also happened to me), etc).

Bottom line, you need incremental backups for data reliability. Doesn't matter how you do it, you can do it on top of RAID 5 to give you more peace of mind if you want, but it's not really necessary. Instead, at a bare minimum, you must be able to go back to several points in time to recover as recent of data as possible.

Re:Ridiculous

[Tim C]

But those LinkSys/Dlink routers typically *are* Linux and iptables; the only difference is the processor and the bus.

Both of which differences would affect throughput, which is exactly what the OP was talking about...

Re:Ridiculous

[pthisis]

Bottom line, you need incremental backups for data reliability. Doesn't matter how you do it, you can do it on top of RAID 5 to give you more peace of mind if you want, but it's not really necessary. Instead, at a bare minimum, you must be able to go back to several points in time to recover as recent of data as possible.

See, for instance:
http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots /

This document describes a method for generating automatic rotating "snapshot"-style backups on a Unix-based system, with specific examples drawn from the author's GNU/Linux experience. Snapshot backups are a feature of some high-end industrial file servers; they create the illusion of multiple, full backups per day without the space or processing overhead. All of the snapshots are read-only, and are accessible directly by users as special system directories. It is often possible to store several hours, days, and even weeks' worth of snapshots with slightly more than 2x storage. This method, while not as space-efficient as some of the proprietary technologies (which, using special copy-on-write filesystems, can operate on slightly more than 1x storage), makes use of only standard file utilities and the common rsync program, which is installed by default on most Linux distributions. Properly configured, the method can also protect against hard disk failure, root compromises, or even back up a network of heterogeneous desktops automatically.

Re:Ridiculous

[ashayh]

Wrong.
No manufacturer is giving less than 3 years warranty.
The 10,000 rpm WD Raptor and all Seagate drives come with 5 year warranty.
I think you wanted to refer to the not so recent attempt by some major players to cut warranty to 1 year. That didn't last long, I guess because their sales must have suffered.

Re:Ridiculous

[lawpoop]

I didn't see anything about warranty on your link. However, this CompUSA hitachi drive has only a 1-year warranty.

You're trolling, or full of it. I see ads from Best Buy, Circuit City, and other places all the time that offer 1 year warranties. They're commonplace, because modern drives are crap.

Re:Ridiculous

[RollingThunder]

MAny of those 486's were built and installed long before home firewalls became available for purchase, much less hitting the $30 price point.

Re:Ridiculous

[josh82]

Also, the main advantage I find in having a computer as a router is that I can easily set it up for packet scheduling (QoS) and bandwidth limiting, something that is unduly expensive when bought in a hardware router.

Re:Ridiculous

[Plural of Mongoose]

I didn't see anything about warranty on your link.

Sure, 'cause it would be too hard fer ya' to drill down a bit, like click on the link for the Seagate drive - you know, one of the brands the parent mentioned...

Then, mebbe you coulda' clicked on the Detailed Specifications link, and read that it does in fact, as the GP stated, have a 5 year warranty.

You're trolling, or full of it.

It took you more time to type out your ill-thought post than it would have taken for you to check the facts.

Just sayin, is all.

Re:Ridiculous

[CableModemSniper]

accidentally running an SQL UPDATE command without a WHERE clause (also happened to me), etc).

I believe this is what transactions are for.

Re:Ridiculous

[ashayh]

You dont see anything about warranty in my link because you're full of it. I gave you the Option of looking at any drive since all of them have atleast 3 yr warranty.
Similar (SATA) drive, with three years warranty.
Call yourself a geek/nerd and you shop on CompUsa??? Tsk tsk.

Re:Ridiculous

[lawpoop]

"Then, mebbe you coulda' clicked on the Detailed Specifications link, and read that it does in fact, as the GP stated, have a 5 year warranty. "

Then why didn't grandparent link to that, instead of another page that didn't explain warranty at all?

"It took you more time to type out your ill-thought post than it would have taken for you to check the facts.

Just sayin, is all."

You should do less sayin', and more readin'. Granparent claimed that " No manufacturer is giving less than 3 year warranty". Not true*. I demonstrated this in my link.

Grandparent also claimed a "not so recent attempt by some major players to cut warranty to 1 year. That didn't last long, I guess because their sales must have suffered." Not true. There are still 1 year warranties currently being offered, as demonstrated in my link.

You too are trolling.

* Does grandparent mean that no manufacturer on Newegg.com is not offering less than 3-year warranties? Then say so. Otherwise, the statement is not true.

Re:Ridiculous

[lawpoop]

I call myself a geek because I did a google search and produced a link that proved you wrong within 30 seconds.

I call you not a geek because either:

1. You made a sloppy comment that can easily misinterpreted as an inaccurate statement -- saying that "No manufacturer is giving less than 3 years warranty" when you meant "No manufacturer /on newegg/". This misinterpretation is made easier by later stating that "I think you wanted to refer to the not so recent attempt by some major players to cut warranty to 1 year. That didn't last long, I guess because their sales must have suffered.". Who are these major players? Just the ones on on Newegg? Do you and the reader agree on who the major players are? Because I consider Maxtor a major player, and they offer a one year warranty (which would make you, again, wrong).

or

2. You are just plain out wrong.

Re:Ridiculous

[EvanED]

No major manufacturer doesn't offer drives with a 3 year warranty, but most (all but Segate?) offer drives with 1 year warranties. WD's special edition drives have 3 yr warranties, and Maxtor's MaxPlus drives have 3 yr warranties, but their lower end drives are all 1.

Examples:
250GB WD from Best Buy
120GB WD from Best Buy

80 GB Maxtor from Best Buy
80GB Hitachi from Best Buy
Actually, I looked at 6 drives at Best Buy's website; 4 had 1 yr warranties, and 1 was a Segate I never expected to.

300GB Maxtor from Newegg
120GB Iomega drive from Newegg
120GB external WD drive from Newegg

Re:Ridiculous

[ashayh]

Google search?? So? My hamster can do a google search and come up with something better.
Because I consider Maxtor a major player, and they offer a one year warranty (which would make you, again, wrong).
Newegg also has Maxtor. The point in this thread and your above quote is "Does Maxtor offer a > 1 year warranty or not?"
Answer: YES, you're too caught with yourself to find it but Maxtor does offer it ! Maxtor also offers a one year warranty for retail-buying-non-geek-pedantic-pricks(or trolls?) like you.
HTH

Re:Ridiculous

[zerocool^]

Heh.

Get a Linksys WRT54G for $89, and update the firmware to 3.03.
http://elvis.netmar.com/~will/qos.JPG

Re:Ridiculous

[josh82]

I suppose I should have said they were unduly expensive.

Anyway, in terms of configurability, scalability, etc., hardware routers win hands-down. And, many people either have an old 486/pentium box lying around or can get one for even less than $89.

Re:Ridiculous

[HadenT]

You probably hit clock bug, it's rather frequent in Linksys WRT54G. Fixed in new firmwares (by overclocking cpu a bit, discussion).

I'm always considering WL-500G or WRT54GS for modest routers: drop openwrt and standart linux system is ready for use.

Granted, they can't push more than 4-6MB/s, but you've got 5-ports + wifi [+ usb + lpt] in small box.

Re:Ridiculous

[Plural of Mongoose]

Okay, you win - if you try REALLY hard, I'll admit you can find a drive with only a one year warranty.

That said, here is a link to the identical model 7K80, 80Gb Death^H^H^Hskstar (IBM / Hitachi OEM, factory sealed) you linked as an example; kindly note the 3 year warranty.

Congrats, however, for managing to find the same item for $24 more, and with a 2 year shorter warranty than the same model you linked to.

Kinda looks to me, generally speaking, like the manufacturers are moving away from 1 year warranties, eh. I will surely concede that someone, somewhere, may in fact be selling them with a 1 year warranty - but it's rare. That, I believe, was the GGP's very point.

Just sayin, is all.

Re:Ridiculous

[Anonymous Coward]

As others have pointed out, modding your post Informative just goes to prove the ignorance of the moderators.

Low-end hard drives come standard with a 1-year warranty. And are cheaper, per megabyte, than those with 3-year (or longer) warranties.

Next time do some actual fact checking before you post.

Re:Ridiculous

[lawpoop]

Well, I've had a different experience. From what I see at the CompUSAs, BestBuys, Office Maxes, Staples, and Circuit Citys, 1-year warranties are common. That's not to say that there are *no* 3-year warranties, but I'd say there is at least something like a 60-40 split. I've never seen a 5-year warranty on an on-the-shelf retail drive.

I think you have some kind of geek bias in the drives you are talking about. I found it easy to find 1-year warranties, and I would say that generally manufacturers are moving towards that, as they make larger drives in the same size factor, and pc prices are dropping in general.

Re:Ridiculous

[lawpoop]

Quoth ashayh:

" No manufacturer is giving less than 3 years warranty. [newegg.com] "

" Newegg also has Maxtor. The point in this thread and your above quote is "Does Maxtor offer a > 1 year warranty or not?"

Take a logic class. Pedantism is geek (think programming). Please be more careful when you post in the future.

Re:Ridiculous

[woah]

... LAPTOP with the screen powered down

...or RIPPED OFF!!!

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Re:Ridiculous

[zerocool^]

True, and to be honest, the hardware QoS in the linksys is good, but not great. For example, with torrents running, I can ssh into my webserver and it feels like i'm sitting at the terminal. However, you can see from the picture - I gave port 80 traffic high priority, but... websurfing is still sluggish with torrents at full tilt.

All in all, though, I have to say that I'm amazed at the versatility of the WRT54G for the price. Since cisco bought linksys, their low end products are really adding features you wouldn't expect to find in non-enterprise class routers. The new firmware also has, for example, a feature that can put every wireless connection in it's own subnet (which i'm sure is just giving out dhcp info of subnetmask 255.255.255.255). It's a simple task, but it's something you don't see in cheapies, or didn't see. I use the feature in business situations where people might be inclined to bring viruses into the network from home.

~Will

Re:Ridiculous

[morgan_greywolf]

Granted, they can't push more than 4-6MB/s, but you've got 5-ports + wifi [+ usb + lpt] in small box. I've gotten far better throughput than that (on the local LAN) with a similar router from Belkin...

Speaking of which...

[PinkX]

I've kept away of the hardware trend since processors hit the 1 Ghz (back in 2000 I guess?), and turned from the hardware junkie to the casual hard drive and memory shopper.

That said, is there any similar RAID controller to that of the article (one of which I have lying somewhere) but for IDE PATA/SATA drives? You know, in order to set up a similar project but with 160-200 Gb SATA drives instead?

Regards,

Re:Speaking of which...

[CyBlue]

3ware and Promise make RAID controllers for IDE. You can get an 8-channel 3ware board for around $30 on eBay.

Re:Speaking of which...

[flokemon]

You have missed the IDE RAID bandwagon! Onto SATA now. You'll actually find many motherboards these days come with integrated SATA RAID, often 2 ports with RAID 0 and RAID 1 capabilities.

If you use Linux, be careful what chipset you are getting as you may struggle with drivers in some cases.

Re:Speaking of which...

[PygmySurfer]

Please don't point this poor soul in the direction of Promise crap. My guess is he wants actual reliability in this setup.

That being said, 3ware makes some damn nice cards. Adaptec, too, though they're a bit more pricey.

Re:Speaking of which...

[PinkX]

I've got one indeed, an Epox 8hda5+ which has 6 SATA ports (very nice motherboard it is). What I was referring to was to a separate, PCI controller.

Re:Speaking of which...

[pangloss]

Try: Comparison of nine Serial ATA RAID 5 adapters

Re:Speaking of which...

[PinkX]

Whoa, thanks for that, exactly what I was looking for. Can't mod you up since I've already posted, but props to you for the link.

Re:Speaking of which...

[Hast]

Never - ever use RAID cards with cheap driver based RAID! It's better to just use what-ever solution is available in your OS natively. The reason being that if your hardware fails you can have problems making the array work again with the new replacement.

Basically the sort of RAID you get from integrated RAID solutions combine the worst parts of harware RAID with the worst parts of software RAID.

eh?

[cryptoz]

What's with the .5TB? Is it not more standard to call it 512 GB, which, at least in my opinion, sounds far more impressive than .5 TB?

Re:eh?

[swilver]

Do it in bytes, that's even more impressive. I have about 2598455214080 bytes of storage in my Linux box, all stuffed in a midi tower (8 drives total)

Re:eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's been a lot of that lately. One that really annoyed me was "$0.4M," apparently meaning "$400,000." Ridiculous.

Re:eh?

[aliquis]

Seems like it was 14 50GB disks, but let's make it easy and said it was raid 0 of 2 250GB disks, then that's not 512GB is it? And also it's only 465GB of data. (most manufacturers count 1GB as 1.000.000.000 Bytes.)

Need more...

[canuck57]

...the "ST118273LC" 18.6 GB drive is readily available on eBay for about $5.00...

But shipping and handling as well as heat would make this too much hastle. Why not just get a left over PC, put in a pair of 250GB drives? Cooler, faster and about the same price or less. And if you ever needed to double or triple it many PCs will hold up to 3 drives and a CD-RON for 4 devices. Or if you really need alot, put 3 x 400GB = 1.2 TB. Use Linux for mirroring and Samba for NT sharing. Maybe even put a wireless card in it so your portable can play DVD images to the TV.

Re:Need more...

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you please tell me what the 'R' stands for in "RAID"?

Why?

[Jailbrekr]

This is not economical, cutting edge, cool, nor is it practical. Why?

1) The drives are used. If you want to impress us, do it with new components with warranties (even refurb). Used makes it impractical and unreliable, even moreso because you didn't use hot swap.
2) It is only 500GB. This can be achieved in a RAID5 configuration with 3 NEW UNDER WARRANTY 250GB drives.
3) Heat. This negates the whole "cool" (both figurative and literal) label.
4) Power. Old drives suck up alot of power. Putting alot of them in a single case is going to draw a major stupid amount of power. Fewer drives can achieve the same effect with a reduced power draw. Did you take a page out of the AMD and 3dfx design methodolgy when you thought up this project?

Re:Why?

[Compu486]

WRONG!!!!! 1. Actualy the drives are new or referbs. 2. good luck finding a raid controler for raid 5 that cheep sucker. 3. A single 450 watt powersupply is not alot of power!

Re:Why?

[Jailbrekr]

Go back to the basement nerd. You are trying to justify a RAID setup with 12-14 small drives that are non hot swap and used. If you bought them from a retailer, I might believe they were refurb, but they were bought on ebay.

Oh, and where did I even mention the RAID controller? I was talking strictly about the array itself.

That setup runs hot, sucks back too much power, and cannot have failed drives swapped out live.

It is not cool, it is not news worthy, and it is not cutting edge.

Price issues...

[flatface]

So all geeking aside, for this project we choose the Seagate Barracuda SCA SCSI line of drives. There are several models you can choose from, the "ST118273LC" 18.6 GB drive is readily available on eBay for about $5.00 a drive, or the "ST150176LC" 50.1 GB at about $15.00 each. I was fortunate enough to get a "Bulk Lot" of the 50 GB model for about $70.00.

And what about us not so fortunate enough to stumble upon deals like this?

Re:Price issues...

[flatface]

Just for clarification, I was talking about not being able to get a .5tb array for this price. Even the 50gb one lists for $33 each on Pricewatch. That'll bring up the price of the drives alone to $330.

There's Some Debate on the "I"

[Noksagt]

The Poor Man's Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks.

Well, many believe that the I is for Independent. See the wikipedia for the debate.

Re:There's Some Debate on the "I"

[Anonymous Coward]

The only "debate" about what the "I" in RAID stands for is from people who weren't around when the concept was first introduced, and can't be bothered to do any significant research.

Historically, RAID has always stood for Redundant Array of INEXPENSIVE Disks.

That someone has attempted to alter the acronym from its origins does not alter that fact.

Re:There's Some Debate on the "I"

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, UC Berkeley used 'inexpensive' when they coined the acronym. No, the IT world is not static. Things change.

Just be glad that the R didn't become 'Rapid,' as some have tried to do & that the 'D' hasn't really become 'Devices' either.

Re:There's Some Debate on the "I"

[coopex]

But changing it to devices might inspire more people to do this.

Bah!

[KenFury]

Nice project but.. at $15 for a 50gb drive 250gb raw will cost you $75. Add in shipping and I bet you are at $100+. I can get a seagate Sata 250Gb from Newegg for 120. I would rather have three of those RAID 5'd for 500Gb useable that some big, loud, hot, power hungry, loud drive array.

Damn the enviroment, burn those kws...

[HiyaPower]

After paying for the electricity to power this thing, you would be much better off with a RR1820A and some Sata drives for about $1000. Not only would it use a lot less power, it would give you a lot more storage. The bucks now are not so much in the hardware (8 250 GB drives + a RR1820A $1100 ~ $250 for the size array this guy made), but in powering the beasts and keeping your house cool in summer at the same time. The way I figure it, you get about a 20:1 power saving on an equivalent sata array.

$60 a barrel oil? What $60 a barrel oil? Must be nice not to have to pay your electricity bills...

Re:Damn the enviroment, burn those kws...

[alexcampbell]

$60 a barrel oil? What $60 a barrel oil? Must be nice not to have to pay your electricity bills...

Yeah, his parents sure are going to be pissed when they get that first electricity bill....

Re:Damn the enviroment, burn those kws...

[Alsee]

Forget the electricity to power this thing, he cites it as pouring out almost a thousand BTU. However much electicity it takes to generate heat, you'll probably need two or three times as much extra electicity to run the airconditioner to pump it out.

Unless of course you happen to live in Alaska, in which case the extra electicity cost would be a wash against the money you save on heating bills.

-

Re:Damn the enviroment, burn those kws...

[MagnusDredd]

Several of my friends have built arrays using highpoint cards. The cards have all failed. They aren't hardware RAID controllers. The Linux drivers are somewhat twitchy in the first place as well, especially with SMP kernels.

OT but...

[Dava]

... the other mod at the site, the LCD Window Kit mixed with the Transparent Screen Backgrounds... could be kinda cool eh?

Only .5 Terabytes?

[Donniedarkness]

This was exciting...3 years ago. I understand that this is on a "budget", but only 500 gb?

RAID with 4xIDE disks is better

[HermanAB]

Fourteen SCSI disk drives - The MTBF will be rather bad...

A more practical RAID is to put 4 large IDE disk drives in an old PC and run software RAID1, to give you two virtual disk drives.

That means that you can't use a CDROM drive, since all IDE ports are used, but you can do a network install using either a boot floppy disk or a USB key.

Re:RAID with 4xIDE disks is better

[toddestan]

That means that you can't use a CDROM drive, since all IDE ports are used, but you can do a network install using either a boot floppy disk or a USB key.

I've done stuff like this. The best thing to do is to get a 5.25" USB 2.0 external drive enclosure, and put the CD/DVD/CD-RW/whatever drive of your choice in it. The enclosure usually only runs about $25-$30. Many computers can boot from USB now, and modern Linux distros have no problems with USB drives. As a bonus, after you are done installing, you can use the drive elsewhere - USB CD drives are almost essential if you have to deal with broken laptops.

Re:RAID with 4xIDE disks is better

[HermanAB]

Yup, though a 128MB USB memory stick is also only about $25 and way smaller - also, booting off a USB stick has a much higher Geek Coolness factor than booting off a clunky old USB CDROM drive... ;-)

Half a terabyte?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha! I accidently deleted that much stuff yesterday, and it wasn't even all of the space I have laying around. I think they just wanted to make it sound big by tacking "TB" on the end.

My laptop has .03TB of space in it!

My shorter HOWTO:

[Saeger]

HOWTO make a 500MB software RAID5 array for about $250:

1. Buy 3 250GB EIDE or SATA HD's very cheaply.
2. Plug them into your cheap linux PC (with at least a 400Watt powersupply). If EIDE then make sure each drive is on its own (master) channel. If your BIOS supports "hardware" RAID, disable it.
3. Use a low-level drive diagnostic fitness test to burn the drives in so you can be sure they won't fail right away. A great tool for this is The Ultimate Boot CD, as well as the 'badblocks' linux util.
4. Assuming your 3 new drives are drives sdb, sdc, and sdd, with your bootdrive on sda (or hda), you should now partition each of them (instead of raiding the entire disk). I recommend creating one primary partition which is slightly smaller than the fullsize of the harddisk, such that if you buy a replacement drive of another brand and it isn't the EXACT same size, you won't be SOL when adding it. Mark the partition type as "FD", which is the raid autodetect type.
5. Verify that your kernel supports software RAID by checking that /proc/mdstat exists, or by checking for the multidisk "md" module in the output of "lsmod | grep md" after attempting to "modprobe md" and "modprobe raid5". If not supported, then... figure that out yourself.
6. Now the fun part (assuming mdadm's installed):
   mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=5 --raid-devices=3 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1
   View the status of the raidset construction by cat'ing /proc/mdstat
7. Put a filesystem on the md0 device with mke2fs /dev/md0 (or mkreiserfs, or whatever)
8. Add a line to your /etc/fstab to automount your new raid array at /raid5 or wherever.
9. Oh, and if your distro doesn't automatically detect your array on reboot, you need to fix that by putting this in your init scripts somewhere:
   mdadm --assemble --scan

Now, wasn't that easy? :)

Re:My shorter HOWTO:

[Anonymous Coward]

if you compile multidisk into the kernel instead of module you can boot off raid5 and dont need have a seperate boot drive.

Re:My shorter HOWTO:

[jsight]

HOWTO make a 500MB software RAID5 array for about $250:

Even better, just send the $250 to me, and I'll send you a _1000_ MB RAID. :)

Re:My shorter HOWTO:

[Saeger]

Yeahyeah, minor typo. :)

I noticed an actual error in my post though: In the mdadm --create line, it's --level=raid5, not --level=5.

Re:My shorter HOWTO:

[mollymoo]

if you compile multidisk into the kernel instead of module you can boot off raid5 and dont need have a seperate boot drive.

You've got to read the kernel from somewhere before you load it, so you need your bootloader to support your array too.

Re:My shorter HOWTO:

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're running udev, don't forget '--auto' on the create command (it creates the device node) : you might get away without it for /dev/md0, but not for others. Also, create /etc/mdadm.conf by doing mdadm --detail --scan >/etc/mdadm.conf afterwards, to assist in bringing it back up after booting. Oh, and mke2fs -j please - anything to cut down unnecessary fscks - although eventually you'll have to fsck it - even 120GB is painfully slow, so you might want to think about taking it offline from time to time to fsck it before the dreaded "has not been fscked for 270 days" message hits you after an outage :) Now if you'll excuse me, I'll go back to waiting for my new RAID1 to finish sync'ing (only another 137 minutes estimated). Ken

Re:My shorter HOWTO:

[Spoing]

HOWTO make a 500MB software RAID5 array for about $250:

OK...let's do the math... 1. Buy 3 250GB EIDE or SATA HD's very cheaply. [pricewatch.com]

(looks up prices) $98.00 * 3 = $294.00.

Reminds me of a friend who keeps insisting that he can build a full-sized house for $10,000.00 if he only had the land.

Re:My shorter HOWTO:

[swillden]

I recommend creating one primary partition which is slightly smaller than the fullsize of the harddisk

I've built a ~600GB RAID array for my home video jukebox, and I'd modify your recipe in one way: Rather than creating just two partitions on each drive, create many, then create many small RAID arrays and glue them together with LVM. The result is much more flexible. You can use different partition sets with different RAID levels for different purposes, and it also makes adding additional storage into the array very easy.

In my case, I have four 200GB drives, so I created 10 20GB partitions on each. Eight of the 10 partitions on each drive are used in RAID-5 arrays, one is used in a RAID-1 array (mirroring, across all four drives), and one is used in a RAID-0 (striped) array.

This initial configuration gives me 80GB of very fast RAID-0 "scratch" space, for storage of data that is not important, 20GB of highly-redundant RAID-1 space for data that is very important, and 480GB of moderately-redundant RAID-5 space for everything else. I set up three volume groups called 0g, 1g, and 5g, containing the appropriate RAID arrays, then carved out logical volumes as needed.

But, as my needs change, I can shift those RAID sets around. Supposing, for example, that I decided I needed more RAID-1 space, I could pull one RAID-5 array out of the 5g volume group, rebuild it as a RAID-1 array, add it to the RAID-1 volume group and then allocate the storage to whichever logical volume needs it.

Not only that, adding new storage becomes easier. With only one large RAID array, adding a new disk to the array requires backing up the entire array, rebuilding it with the additional disk and then restoring the data.

With many small arrays, as long as there's enough free space that you can remove an array from the volume group, you can rebuild it one array at a time. I actually started with three 200GB disks, so each of my RAID-5 arrays held 40GB, not 60GB. When I added the fourth disk, I wrote a small script that went through the eight RAID-5 arrays, pulling each one out, destroying it, rebuilding it with four disks and reinserting it into the volume group. The whole process took about a day to run, but my data stayed both available and safe the whole time, and didn't require me to figure out where I could back up nearly 200GB worth of data.

Re:My shorter HOWTO:

[LazyBoy]

In my case, I have four 200GB drives, so I created 10 20GB partitions on each.

OK. But how painful is it when a drive fails? 10 arrays to repair?!

Re:My shorter HOWTO:

[swillden]

OK. But how painful is it when a drive fails? 10 arrays to repair?!

Yes, but they're easy to repair, and, really, repairing 10 isn't much harder than repairing one. Taking care to make all of the device numbers nice means that a little for loop will do them all.

Re:My shorter HOWTO:

[MagnusDredd]

Why 400w power supply? And for a 3 drive array? WTF kind of hardware are you running the array on?

My 8 drive array uses a 300w power supply, with room to spare.

Re:My shorter HOWTO:

[Anonymous Coward]

> In my case, I have four 200GB drives, so I created 10 20GB partitions on each. Eight of the 10 partitions on each drive are used in RAID-5 arrays, one is used in a RAID-1 array (mirroring, across all four drives), and one is used in a RAID-0 (striped) array.

This sounds good in theory, but if you have any other access going on on the other arrays, you are going to slow down your RAID0...seems like it would defeat the purpose.

Re:My shorter HOWTO:

[Saeger]

Interesting setup you've got there, even if is a bit harder to wrap your head around, and is more complex when layered and hence more prone to potential failure.

So yeah, currently it's not possible to easily grow a software raid5 multidisk when you want to add another disk, so I decided to experiment with this discrete-RAID+LVM method (with FedoraCore4 in VMware), and I just might go this route in a future system. My current system is 4x 250GB SATA drives + 1 PATA, with 2 SATA in RAID1, and the remaining drives using a combo of raid1, 0, and 5.

What I ended up doing in my test was adding three 4GB drives, and then dividing each into the maximum number of possible usable partitions: 14 (3 primary + 11 logical). I automated this part with a fdisk heredoc script since "sfdisk" was giving me problems so I couldn't use it to clone the extended partitions to the other drives.

I then created 14 raid5 sets spanning those 3 partitions (skipping sdX4):
# mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=5 --raid-devices=3 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1
...
# mdadm --create /dev/md13 --level=5 --raid-devices=3 /dev/sda15 /dev/sdb15 /dev/sdc15

Next I initialized each array device as LVM, added them to my new "raid5vg" volume group, created a single logical volume called "stuff" which used all the space in the volgroup minus one PV for shuffle room (explained below), formatted it, and mounted it:
#pvcreate /dev/md0
...
# pvcreate /dev/md13
# vgcreate raid5vg /dev/md0 /dev/md1 /dev/md2 /dev/md3 /dev/md4 /dev/md5 /dev/md6 /dev/md7 /dev/md8 /dev/md9 /dev/md10 /dev/md11 /dev/md12 /dev/md13
# vgdisplay raid5vg | grep "Total PE"
Total PE 2016
# pvdisplay /dev/md0 | grep "Total PE"
Total PE 144
# lvcreate -l 1872 raid5vg -n stuff
# mke2fs -j /dev/raid5vg/stuff
# mount /dev/raid5vg/stuff /stuff

So now I have a perfectly usable system with greater future flexibility and to test that flexibility I wanted to add a 4th drive to the current 3 drive raid-5 setup, without backing up or rebooting (except to add the new drive itself if not hot-swapable). This is done by shifting all the data in one of the raid5 md## physical volumes to the other physical volumes, removing it from the volume group, rebuilding it to span FOUR partitions, then adding it back to the vg. Repeat 13 more times:
# pvmove /dev/md0
# vgreduce raid5vg /dev/md0
Removed "/dev/md0" from volume group "raid5vg"
# pvremove /dev/md0
Labels on physical volume "/dev/md0" successfully wiped
# mdadm --stop /dev/md0
# mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=5 --raid-devices=4 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1
# vgextend raid5vg /dev/md0

pvmove takes a looooong time to shuffle the data, and it's got to do it 13 more iterations, but I suppose all this is a small price to pay for not having a way to back up your data before rebuilding a bigger raid array, eh?

Anyway, this post was also for my future reference. I suppose I'll google it if needed. Thanks for providing the spark.

Re:My shorter HOWTO:

[Saeger]

400W for headroom and future expandability. 7200RPM drives can use up to 10W each, and for desktop raid you're usually sucking power from intel heaters (aka: cpu's), vidcards, etc. I suppose you could get by on 300W if you account for everything.

Re:My shorter HOWTO:

[Saeger]

Just wanted to fix that last part -- pvremove isn't needed, but a missing pvcreate is needed after mdadm creates the new array. Also, added --run to the raid5 recreation to skip the confirmation prompt (in a script):
# pvmove /dev/md0
# vgreduce raid5vg /dev/md0
Removed "/dev/md0" from volume group "raid5vg"
# mdadm --stop /dev/md0
# mdadm --create --run /dev/md0 --level=5 --raid-devices=4 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1
# pvcreate /dev/md0
# vgextend raid5vg /dev/md0

I dont think some of you are getting it.....

[Compu486]

This is RAID 5. If you understand the significance of that then don't post.... your just embarrassing your self's. Secondly... This is "Hardware" based Raid. Not to be confused with Software. Retards run software based RAID.

Re:I dont think some of you are getting it.....

[stanleypane]

You're embarassing yourself. Just because the guy uses a big ugly black box doesn't mean it's hardware RAID. RTFA:

We will also be covering a method that uses software RAID, and a USB based interface. Then you can paint it to look like a big iPod and make your friends all jealous.

He used Linux to do the software RAID.

Re:I dont think some of you are getting it.....

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of posts are shooting down this project, and to be fair this is rather a dinosaur but lets look at the positives. Firstly as you point out, it's a real hardware RAID5 over SCSI, that means its fast
as hell. If you ignore the fact that these guys built it on the cheap with 50G drives you can see that actual capacity of the 4 unit 19 rack they have built is 14 x 300 = 4.2T for the same heat overhead. What no one else mentions is that the USB and Firewire raids many are talking about cannot handle any data throughput compared to a scsi bus and quickly choke on raid5 writes. Also they do not handle transferring SMART data so that smartd can keep an eye on your temperatures for you, afaik.

The construction is what its all about. Sure you can make a multi terabyte raid in software using nothing but external firewire or USB2 disks, but while this is fine for a home setup you won't get any sensible outcome if you try hauling that sprawling mass of wires down to the local rackshack for coloaction hosting. The rackshack gaffer will tell you its a fire hazard most likely and to come back with it in ISO racking.

Making big reliable storage systems is still all about power supplies, fans, cable runs and heat coupling as much as fancy software. This project looks well thought out and neatly put together.

Yes the storage specs are laughable, but the spirit is commendable. Using this as a blueprint you could easily make a 10T raid substituting top spec components.

Re:I dont think some of you are getting it.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Retards run software based RAID.
but at least the retards data doesn't disappear if the controller dies

1Gb for under 1000 and it runs cool

[KenFury]

http://www.mashie.org/casemods/udat1.html

Re:1Gb for under 1000 and it runs cool

[jmt9581]

1993 called, and they want their storage array back.

Or did you mean to say TB?

Re:1Gb for under 1000 and it runs cool

[KenFury]

oops..

Keep those drives cool!

[Futurepower(R)]

Keep those drives cool! Mount a fan next to them, using plastic straps for flexibility so as not to vibrate the drive.

I like WD, but now Seagate has 5-year warranties.

Um, yeah, the article is not that cool.

[aussersterne]

1. Get a big server tower case w/5+ 5.25" bays.
2. Get 4 250GB EIDE drives (cheap anymore!)
3. Get 4 $20.00 CompUSA lockable EIDE drive trays.
4. Get an SMP board + CPUs and slap 'em in there.

Ta-da. One power supply, four quiet drives, one case, software RAID-5 easily swappable with 2 dedicated fans per drive, looks professional, comparatively quiet, with the benefit of included scalable SMP workstation. And .7TB to boot. Or get a PCI EIDE raid card compatible with both Linux and Windows and go to town with RAID-0 and 1TB.

There was a time when a SCSI array of many, many drives in a separate case at 10k RPM was something to lust after at home, but these days it just isn't. You can get close enough at home while saving space, using less power, and getting better overall performance.

Re:Um, yeah, the article is not that cool.

[totallygeek]

1. Get a big server tower case w/5+ 5.25" bays
2. Get 4 250GB EIDE drives (cheap anymore!)
3. Get 4 $20.00 CompUSA lockable EIDE drive trays.
4. Get an SMP board + CPUs and slap 'em in there.

Ta-da. One power supply, four quiet drives, one case, software RAID-5 easily swappable with 2 dedicated fans per drive, looks professional, comparatively quiet, with the benefit of included scalable SMP workstation. And .7TB to boot. Or get a PCI EIDE raid card compatible with both Linux and Windows and go to town with RAID-0 and 1TB.

Don't forget the best part about the above is the fact that you would have a warranty!

Re:Um, yeah, the article is not that cool.

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you hooking the drives to? The motherboard IDE ports? One drive master, the other slave?

In that case, if your master fails, the slave will go with it. Giving you a 50% chance that the entire array will fail in RAID 5.

Re:Um, yeah, the article is not that cool.

[Anonymous Coward]

right...do those four things while staying under $250. FAT CHANCE MOTHER FUCKER

Power, Heat, Noise

[PhotoGuy]

While it's cool to grab dirt cheap drives, I would think that if this is running 24/7, the impact on power costs and heat added to the room, would make this less cost effective long term. Also, I bet it's a lot noisier than just grabbing a few 300g drives and RAID-5'ing them for .6T storage. Also, with that many drives (and older ones), there's a lot more points of failure.

Low Tech Routers

[nurb432]

Not a good comparison, as if you get an old machine to run as a 'router', you get a few more features then the cheapo dedicated units..

Ive also found that those cheap 'home routers' that you get for 50 bucks or less are absolute garbage.

1/2TB?! {laughs}

[Dixie Flatliner]

I laugh at your pathetic array, try this on for size....
http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage/20041006/raid core32-04.html

4x Broadcom SATARAID PCIX
32x 160GB Maxtor SATA HDD

Otherwise known as 5TB of raid lovin'

How I built a 2.8TB RAID 5 storage array

[Yeechang Lee]

The price/GB is nice, but 14 drives in a rackmount case for merely 0.5TB? Bah!

Four months ago I detailed in a lengthy Usenet post how I built a 2.8TB RAID 5 array for home use. It sits on the floor of my hallway closet and, I'm happy to report, hasn't had a lick of trouble. I'd love to hear others' thoughts on my project.

Re:How I built a 2.8TB RAID 5 storage array

[pavera]

I agree with you,
I have 2TB at my home as well (well 1.75TB usable), 8 250GB SATA drives, at about 150 each, I actually think I have better price/GB. Anyway, having a huge disk array isn't even geeky its almost becoming a necessity (music, movies, tv shows, home videos), every home needs at least 500GB, probably closer to 1TB, and since drives are so big anymore, its easy to slap 4 or 5 in a case, get a SATA raid card, and fly.

I learned my lesson...

[whig]

Many years ago, back in the days of MFM and RLL hard drive controllers, I got a really cool device by a company called Perstor which would take any MFM drive and convert it to ARLL, yielding a huge size increase of about 90%. So I put in a shiny new 40 MB (yep, megabytes in those days) and got 76 MB of capacity. Whee!

Then the CONTROLLER failed. The drive itself was fine. But Perstor, in the meantime, had gone out of business. Bye bye data.

Oh the humanity

[Anonymous Coward]

Rather than mod you -1, Embarrassing, I just want to let you know how much I cringe for you. Something about retards, too.

Mods on crack

[MustardMan]

How in the blue fuck is this offtopic? I need to get my hands on whatever these people are smoking.

Once again timothy....

[Anonymous Coward]

You post a crappy article?

Why do you suck so hard?

DIY shocker

[Anonymous Coward]

Man puts disk-drive in box! Read on for all the shocking details.

In next week's issue: your free 16-page cut-out-and-throw-away guide to opening the fridge.

Re:There's Some Debate on the "I" - Very True

[WidescreenFreak]

Exactly. I always use "independent" because "inexpensive" is completely relative. If you make a 22-disk RAID 0+1 out of (for example) Sun 147 GB fibre-channel drives, I can most assuredly guarantee that "inexpensive" does NOT qualify!

RE: RAID 5 with 2 drives?

[arcadum]

How exactly do you do RAID 5 with a pair of drives? You freak out and find one that fits the array.

This is news?

[Grimster]

4x250G SATA
Motherboard with onboard 4 port sata raid
1G ram
AMD 3000+
ATI 9800pro

Put this all together several months ago for around 1100 bucks, nothing out of this world, No redundancy just straight raid-0 and 960 gigs or so of usable space (I'm just storing music and movies if the drives go south oh well).

My other pc that runs my 57" projection TV has 4x120 and 3x80 gig drives in one bigass volume set (yeah boo hiss) and the machine next to it has 4x160 gig on a 3ware ide raid controller to hold even more ripped DVD's. All of these are RMA or pulled harddrives from servers, once I pull a drive I won't use it in a production machine again so it goes towards adding more to my home network! haha

gigabyte ramdisk is better alternative

[jasonhamilton]

Get one or two 4 gig gigabyte pci ramdisk cards, put your OS on one, and your webserver files or whatever on the other. Cron a backup to your normal hard disk every few hours or so and you'll beat the crap out of any hard disk ever made.

This Raid Array does not work.

[Anonymous Coward]

This raid array despite what the article says. Does NOT ACTUALLY WORK.

1. He does not show the drives setup in linux.
2. There are power issues.

For the other projects on the site. The macn'pc does not work.
As for the lcd screen I can't tell you if he really did that one.

Re:This Raid Array does not work.

[Compu486]

they are real, and do work. i have seen them my self. maby your not real and you dont work....

all those used components off ebay...

[The Optimizer]

I wonder how long before one of them fails, or if there aren't any incompaiblities between them.... That'll be fun to debug.

Hah... You have been outsmarted...

[illumin8]

From TFA:

But I
like to buy and build systems I can use for years and years without
having to bother with upgrading, and figure I've made a long-term (at
least 4-5 years, which is long term in the computer world) investment
that provides me with much more than just storage functionality. And
again, $1.46/GB is hard to beat.

Sure, call me in two years from now, when they come out with $5 laser-etched holographic 3d memory cubes, which store an unlimited amount of data in a space the size of a few cubic inches... Need a few more petabytes of space? Just ask the laser etching device to allocate a few more nano-blocks. We'll finally need 128-bit filesystems then.

Meanwhile, you'll have a noisy space heater hidden in your closet, that dims the lights in a half-block radius every time a drive overheats and the array goes into rebuild mode... :-P

Just kidding... It sounds like you got a lot of bang for your buck. Congrats on the nice (and well built, I might add) fat RAID array. (you lucky bastard)... :-)

Re:Hah... You have been outsmarted...

[Yeechang Lee]

Meanwhile, you'll have a noisy space heater hidden in your closet, that dims the lights in a half-block radius every time a drive overheats and the array goes into rebuild mode... :-P

In all seriousness, I didn't mention the electricity cost in my original Usenet post since of course I didn't have sufficient data then. According to the PG&E Web site:

Bill date kWh Cost
6/12/2005 511 $66.46
5/12/2005 501 $57.74
4/13/2005 498 $57.03
3/14/2005 527 $60.34
2/10/2005 725 $85.39
1/11/2005 693 $80.98
12/10/2004 577 $66.13

I live in a studio apartment in downtown San Francisco and had a Linux desktop run 24/7 before deploying the RAID server (also 24/7) on 15 February. As far as I can tell it hasn't affected my total power consumption one bit! Perhaps I somehow built a perpetual-motion machine.

And yes, I can also gladly report that rebuilding the RAID array (once to build the array in the first place, and once accidentally in the first week) neither causes the lights to dim nor dogs to howl at the moon.

Just kidding... It sounds like you got a lot of bang for your buck. Congrats on the nice (and well built, I might add) fat RAID array. (you lucky bastard)... :-)

Thank you. I knew before building the array that what I wanted to achieve was straightforward enough technically, but that there was a real chance noise, heat, and power would be issues. I've already talked about the power (NB: Load on the preexisting UPS that serves both the array and my longtime Linux system is 84%). Thanks to the closet, noise isn't an issue. And despite the closet, heat is surprisingly not an issue, either; my logs say the warmest one of the drives gets is 41C, which is acceptable in my book.

I'm a software person. I *don't* like playing with hardware. I have no interest in taking a hacksaw and Dremel and modding a case, or doing what the 0.5TB guy did and having to build giant fan clusters in hopes of keeping his array from combusting in The Simpsons-style flames. I wanted to build something with off-the-shelf components that would be reliable and which I could (literally) stick in a closet and forget about for months or years at a time. I am very, very satisfied with the results. At least until the $5 laser-etched holographic 3d memory cubes arrive, of course.

Re:Hah... You have been outsmarted...

[NerveGas]

Sure, call me in two years from now, when they come out with $5 laser-etched holographic 3d memory cubes, which store an unlimited amount of data in a space the size of a few cubic inches...

If he does call you, I think he'll be laughing. I can remember hearing about 3D holographic memory being the "wave of the future" something like 8 or 10 years ago. Wake me up if it ever actually shows up.

steve

Missing the point

[ebuck]

It's not ridiculous when you account for the failure scenario.

It has always been cheaper to buy a single big disk than it is to buy a raid, but do tell us, how do you expect to:

1. Replace the disk while still allowing access to it's contents?
2. Recover your data after your single disk has failed?

Raid has more advantages than just size, and although it's easy to point out that the storage size could be had more cheaply, that's not the same thing as saying that a hardware controller based RAID 5 system could be had more cheaply.

Yet another implementation

[AndrewSchaefer]

I did this a 6 months ago with 10x250 GB IDE drives. It's a bit of a cabling nightmare, but with a dremel, drill, and some determination, I crafted a 5x2 "plane" setup. As the article points out, cooling is a major factor. The 4 fans I slapped on the front of the array keep it at a very nice 80 degrees year round. I haven't had a disk die yet, but I've got spares sitting in shrink wrap just incase.

http://www.schaefer.nu/pics/nikita/

My 0.9TB *quiet* RAID 5 howto

[The Optimizer]

I just recently built a file server for my home. The most important considerations for me were data protection (I've got too much to lose), reliability, economy of operation and quietness, since the server would be in my office running 24/7.

First off, Low-noise is my new religion (with 8 PC's in my office, it makes a huge difference), and secondly I don't belive in skimping... being frugal and practical yes, but cutting quality to save a buck (a la walmart) .. NO.

So to achive that I acquired the following:
- Antec Sonata Lifestyle case.
- nForce 2 motherboard with out chipset cooling fan (just heat sink)
- ATI Radeon 9200se video card with out cooling fan (just heat sink)
- Mobile Athlon XP 2400+ CPU - 35 watts
- 22 db Socket A Heat sink/Cooling fan unit
- 22 db 12cm fan.
- Gigabit NIC
- 512mb RAM
- Combo optical drive
- Samsung 120gb drive (to hold OS, and work space)
- 3ware Escalade 7504-LP RAID controller
- 4x Maxtor 300gb 5400 RPM Drives (chosen for lower heat output over 7200 RPM) drives
- APC 1000va UPS

So put it all together and you get a system that has a total of only 4 fans in it including the one in the power supply. It is the quietist PC I have. The case has a nice rack to hold the 4 RAID drives with cushions to reduce vibration/noise and mount a 12cm fan draw air directly across them, as well as another at the back to produce decent airflow despite their lower cfm ratings.

It runs cool and very quiet. I can't hear *anything* out of that system if my ears are more than a foot away from it. I can transfer large files like .iso to/from it at more than 40mb a second. It's protected and will safely shutdown in an extended power outage.

It wasn't $250, but it's good enough for me to do real production work on and sleep better at night.

So I may not have the fastest possible server, but it's still more than enough

You could replicate using 400gb drives for 1.2TB of storage by trading off for the slightly higher heat of 7200 RPM.

Take it farther...

[HockeyPuck]

I spend my entire life managing large SANs, so RAID is done in the array (EMC, HDS) while basic volume management is done on the host (LVM, VXVM)... so when i first read this I thought that somebody had used linux and a fibrechannel HBA running in target mode (http://www.emulex.com/ts/docfc/linux/430l/target_ mode_intro.htm)

Put that up on /. and you'll have something b/c you'll have shown something more than 'look what linux can do' that the other OS's have had for years...

And then going on to mount those luns on another system (say a solaris, aix or another linux box). Instead, I was dissapointed to find out that you took a linux box and created enough software RAID to for a TB or more. If this was done with windows, it would be rejected... so why doing it with Linux make it front page news?

Re:Take it farther...

[rajohn]

you mean like falconstor's product?

Re:Take it farther...

[HockeyPuck]

Atleast rolling your own like falconstor's takes a bit of skill, rather than this "Linux for Dummies" example.

Logical Volume Manager

[mpeg4codec]

I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned the Linux Logical Volume Manager subsystem. It has many of the features of RAID arrays [such as spanning across multiple drives] with the added flexibility of being able to dynamically add [and theoretically remove] drives.

Unfortunately, aside from RAID'ing the volumes or something similar, I haven't been able to find any information on making the system redundant.

Read about it more on TLDP. It's a very robust system that works well on both servers and desktops.

Re:Logical Volume Manager

[Yeechang Lee]

I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned the Linux Logical Volume Manager subsystem.

As mentioned, my 2.8TB setup uses LVM2 on RAID 5 (mdadm, not raidtools). I think anyone building one of these babies would be crazy to not use LVM; why limit your future expansion options?

nothing special

[Anonymous Coward]

serious ide raid junkies will have acera 16 port cards. mines in use on my supermicro pedestal case, can only squeeze 15 400's in place but you do the math. if only the 500s were out for a nice round number

I am testing silicon image (SIL)

[some1somewhere]

I know exactly what you mean...

I am also experiementing with cheapo RAID cards (actually mostly software RAID cards, not the high end 3ware cards) and found that you really won't be able to use them as your boot disk, since they only become really RAID1 (or RAID5) with the driver loaded, and the way to get the driver loaded... you guessed it, is to have the operating system already loaded, like on a different HD, which sort of defeats the purpose of having a RAID card since you won't be able to boot if /dev/hda dies or whatever.

Re:I am testing silicon image (SIL)

[aliquis]

But if the OS drive dies you don't lose your data.

What I run at my place

[hpj]

I have a 36x250gb system running based on SATA running RAID-6 for my TV. I use it to put my DVD:s and CD:s available at the touch of a button on my remote. The whole setup has cost me considerably more than $250 but appart from the costs for the actual discs the cost of the system was very minimal (Not more than a regular desktop I would guess) and the main problem was finding a cheap case and a cheap motherboard with enough PCI sockets to house the SATA controllers needed.

The entire setup is standing in my laundry room so I don't have to hear the noise of the multitude of fans needed to cool the sucker down. Also I can definately recommend using RAID-6 for anything this large since disc:s do fail on an alarming basis and before I moved from RAID-5 to RAID-6 it was always nervewrecking before I managed to sync up the RAID again that no other disks would fail (I have had one multiple disc crash but managed to recover everything but a few blocks through some clever dd tricks).

uh... why is this so amazing?

[Anonymous Coward]

they put together a raid with cheap disks. amazing, lets give these people an award for something people do every god damn day. can i get 5 minutes of /. fame for the Dell 725N NAS i converted to a Slackware-10.1 LVM2-over-RAID 5 NAS?

RAIFs

[ChodeMonkey]

I think it would be more interesting to consider a redundent array of independent flash cards. Since it is clear that solid state drives will soon be included in PCs and laptops in the near future it would be nice to address the speed and reliability issues associated with them. This would also help with the heat and all.

Just a thought.

Need for network storage

[Bruha]

Current HD Dvr's cannot cut it in the storage department and the lure of a DVD jukebox using MythTV http://www.mythtv.org/ is quite enticing.

However 100 DVD's require more than 1.5 tb though someone smart could build a system that takes the dvd and recodes it as divx 5.0 so you get menus and all the other nice things which would save on the space.

Course that all goes down the drain when HD Dvd's finally come out.

Re:Need for network storage

[satterth]

I know its not linux based like MythTV but...

http://www.ratdvd.dk/index.htm

ratDVD takes a full featured DVD-9 movie and puts it into a highly compressed .ratDVD container format file of about 1.x GB in size - while preserving all the features of the original DVD.

2 disks?

[EvilStein]

In a few weeks, I think Hitachi is releasing 500gb drives.
Those 400gb Seagate drives are already less than $300 at Fry's. :)

Read my reply to the direct parent post,

[anti-NAT]

you might be interested in another advantage of your set up that you may not be aware of.

Re:Read my reply to the direct parent post,

[Anonymous Coward]

could you possibly be *any* more cryptic? Your post was just about as useful as this one!

These guys were data retarded,

[anti-NAT]

when they're hardware RAID controller failed, and they weren't able to get an exact replacement.

The Adaptec 2110S RAID card in Fark's database server is dying.

I'd suggest you reconsider who you are calling a retard, because us "Software RAID array retards" will never, ever have those sorts of problems, as long as an ATA interface is available for our RAID'ed drives on a box that can run Linux.

1.5 TB Array on the cheap....

[MagnusDredd]

1) Free -- Machine was an old K6-2 500 (192MB RAM, 1.4G Boot Drive) that I had laying around.
2) Free -- I got a full tower case from my brother in law (no faceplate).
3) Free -- I had a few 120mm fans laying around which I have cooling the drives.
4) $1040 -- 8 Maxtor 250 GB PATA HDs. (8MB cache, 7200 RPM)
5) $215 -- 3Ware 7810 (8 port PATA hardware RAID 5 card).
6) $140 -- APC RS 1500 battery backup. (You don't want the array to suddenly lose power for any reason!)

Total Cost $1395.

What it got me: I have 1400 GB usable redundant storage with a hot-spare. If a drive fails at 1:00am the computer will automatically start the rebuild on the spare drive, and likewise if I'm not home. This was more important than the additional storage. I also know that I can get 40 minutes of power out of the APC if the power goes out. The machine is set up to shut itself down in the event that the battery runs low.

I didn't have to fight with any software configs. The driver is included in the Linux kernel source, and can be compiled into the kernel. I don't have to worry about figuring out SMART data. "tw-cli info c0" gives me easily readable output on all of the drives plugged into the RAID card. It's simple, does the job, is stable as all hell, and was fairly cheap. It would have cost nearly as much to have bought 4 PATA cards (ones not using the flawed silicon image controller) as it cost for the 3ware card off of eBay.

More information here.

Re: RAID 5 with 2 drives?

[JabberWokky]

What?

--
Evan

Re:There's Some Debate on the "I" - Very True

[Carnivore]

I guess the implication of "inexpensive" is that if it were possible to buy a 1470 gb sun fibre-channel disk, it would cost well over 22 times as much as the 147 gb disk.

And, with the one big drive, you don't get any redundancy or hot spares.

Anyway, just a thought.

Choice of RAID controller & RIAD level corrupt

[Anonymous Coward]

Recently a client had a drive fail in a RAID 5 configuration on a Dell server. You know the theory: pull the drive, replace it, watch RAID rebuild. However, that was not the situation. The RAID had quitely become corrupted. Subsequently I discovered from OnTrack that is not as uncommon as one might think. Running RAID 5 on our computers in the office ourselves, I became concerned about this and looked into it further. Luckily, we run Adaptec RAID controllers, Adaptec's RAID controllers (including Zero Channel) have the ability to verify the RAID integrity and repair it. I don't know which other controllers have this ability, but it can be a lifesaver. We run the utility once a month.

Need suggestions for Multi-TB setup

[donkeyoverlord]

I've been working with a guy helping him setup his home theater system. Right now he's upto 9 TB of storage all running off of external firewire drives (http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?P roductCode=102670-1 1TB each drive). What I really want to do is get him setup with some sort of easily upgradeable system that is redundent. Price is not the biggest issue, easy of use and ability to upgrade is the most important. Right now he's expanding at 1TB every 1.5 months. I was looking at http://coraid.com/, anyone have any other suggestions.?

Re:There's Some Debate on the "I" - Very True

[Anonymous Coward]

"Inexpensive" was originally relative to larger, high-bandwidth drives with exotic features like command offloading (most cool SCSI features came from the mainframe world) and several read/write heads per platter on separate acutators. It still boils down to "you don't have to buy just one of the fastest, most reliable drive on the market".

Ironic?

[serutan]

I find it somewhat painfully ironic that this GREAT homebrew article is an ASP.Net app!

Nonetheless, this is definitely going to be the solution for my huge and poorly backed up mp3 collection, which has been running on borrowed time for several years. After posting this I will be heading over to EBay to start looking for deals on components. Many thanks to the submitter!

Big problem with RAID1

[svallarian]

There's a huge problem that everyone seems to forget with magical RAID setups.

RAID only protects you against hardware failure, not logical drive failures. I've had quite a few RAID5 arrays become...redundant but useless...crashing down due to logical errors on the partition created by the wonderful OS.