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!

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.

Howto

[zabagel]

Possible new Slashdot Category?

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

[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

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.

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.

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

[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

[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.

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?

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: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: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.

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.