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Home Network Data Storage Device
It happened again- a machine on my home network died. Taking with it tons of data. It's mostly backed up. No huge loss. But I finally think it's time to get some sort of network raid disk. A unified place to safely store data accessible to the numerous machines on my home lan. So now I pose to Slashdot readers- what are your recommendations? I'm looking for something with RAID and SMB sharing. At least a quarter TB, probably a half, but with some room to grow. What have you used? What works? What fails?
As CmdrTaco, I'm sure you have money coming out of your ears that you've harvested from the pseudo-religion that is Slashdot.
... I know, I know, I'm going to catch hell for using such a crappy generic product. And I know many people who will tell you that VIA is crap when it comes to RAID controllers. Maybe you're one of them. If you are, I hear that the brand Promise provides excellent RAID controllers, you'll just pay a whole lot more for them. A couple of these babies in RAID 1 and you're set.
But for those of you with fewer fiscal resources, I will tell you the stories of my friend and me, a.k.a. The Master Rebaters.
My story is a simple one. I love music. I have over 1,000 CDs and have spent a lot of time meticulously ripping them with my friend CDex. So, I have some 350-400GB of data that I would like to archive. There are a multitude of possibilities but, since I'm short on cash, I opted for a simple $13 RAID 1 controller
My friend, however, opted for a huge and expensive RAID 6 array controller made by Promise. Then he waited and waited until there was a 250 GB Maxtor rebate at CompUSA or Outpost and went in and bought five with cash. Then he filled out the rebates for relatives and played the waiting game. Huge initial investment but he received a lot of money back slowly. Result, a 1.1 ~ 1.2 TB RAID array. He got a lot more storage and more efficient use of the disks since a RAID 6 with striping allows for drives to be rebuilt in the array.
What he wasn't planning on was the logistics of what he would have to do to his Antec case as a result of all these drives. Fans. Airflow. Heat. These all became huge issues for him--especially in the summer. I'm not sure what your situation is with a case but I made no alterations to my case.
Now, there's a lot of things I skipped over that you can take into consideration, like SATA or ATA? 7,200 RPM or 10,000 RPM? 8MB or 16MB buffer? Striping size? etc. Honestly, those issues aren't worth my time to mess with. Sure sure, I'm losing precious ms seek/read time on my disks but I'm not that motivated.
In the end, if you're only looking for half a TB, do what I did. Those 500 GB drives will only get cheaper and if one blows, just pop another in. And if you really need that room to grow, grab the nice RAID controller that supports RAID 0-6 and just use two 500GBs leaving the other three slots open for the future when you might buy them and RAID 6 it.
What fails? The old IBM Deathstars. Beware!
My work here is dung.
First I'd recomend using a size formating in your question that better fits your situation like "At least 250GB, probably 500GB, but with some room to grow".
On to solutions. Buy yourself a big case (you can do rackmount or regular "large" ATX cases) and stick a decent computer in there. Add Gigabit NIC. Add an 8 port 3ware SATA Raid controller (configured to RAID5). Add 4 120GB 7200RPM SATA Drives (or what ever you can find cheap, even 200GB drives are relativly cheap these days). Install Linux, share your harddrive using Samba. Done.
You have 4 extra ports to expand your RAID if you need too, or you could get bigger harddrives. I think 3Ware cards can support up to 2TB of HD space - so that gives you some expandability. Plus you have a RAID5 which has fault tollerence built in.
snowulf.com
Tera Station
Everything you need probably. I saw a 1TB version for $700 at Fry's the other day.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
There are dozens of products out there to do this. Linksys alone makes several. You obviously didn't search slashdot, google, etc. The fact this article got accepted... Words fail me.
-Foxxz
If you have the funds, this looks promising.
:)
LaCie Biggest F800 1.6TB RAID Storage 300943U (USB 2.0, Firewire 800).
It's only CAD $2,599.99, so that's like US $100
How can you dupe so many stories yet fail to dupe your own data? :)
I've been looking on-line trying to find this sort of possibility and the only prefab system I've found that has configurable RAID in a consumer NAS is the Buffalo Terrastation. I've seen lots of NAS devices but basically they are all just a single hard drive with a network connection.
I have not used one of these and do not know if it's any good, but like I said, I haven't seen any other options for a prefab system. I've priced out what it would cost to roll my own system like this and it ends up being only a tad more expensive to get a prefab device. Actually, I think the price dropped on the terrastation so I'm not sure that's true anymore.
Also, if you get something like this, you should seriously consider upgrading to gigabit Ethernet if you haven't already. I have a network mounted share for most of my files and it works pretty well, but when I try to do things like synchronize my ipod against it, it totally crawls. Having a networked file server works better if it doesn't feel like your files are on a network.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
My condolences on your recent loss.
Couple questions:
1. SMB only? NFS is faster and plain better, but only for mac/linux.
2. Noise/size/power constraints.
3. Price.
SMB only, moderately cheap, quiet and small, go for a teraserver from buffalo networks. Easy to setup, runs decently, 4x250 drives that can be raid-5'd into a 750 array. Costs about $800.
A good midlevel solution is an nforce4 motherboard, with 4 250 sata drives, total cost around $600 w/ cpu mem, etc. You need a decent case though, and it will be noisier and louder. Plus side is better performance, full customization, and ability to use it as a router or such. You will have to configure it yourself, and likely throw windows on it because the nforce raid support is tricky on linux for a novice.
I use a heavier 2tb solution myself with a HW raid card, but for most purposes a sw raid is better, and the performance difference is almost never noticable. Personally I recommend the buffalo if you don't need nfs, just for the size, quietness, and convenience.
The first rule of USENET is you do not talk about USENET.
Recipe for xbox raid network storage:
Add 1 Xbox ($130)
Add 1 mod chip ($30)
Add 2 250 GB HDDs ($250) -- you can either disconnect the CD-ROM or follow instructions on adding a second hard drive, but disconnecting allows everything to be internal
Add 1 Linux for Xbox ($0)
Stir in Raid 5 set-up and samba
And you've got yourself a headless quarter terabyte raid 5 network server for a low-budget of $410.
I record a lot of concerts at 24/96 and also have a large collection of music in FLAC format. Current archive is 3.5TB and rapidly growing. It mostly consists of 320 and 250GB S/ATA WD drives.
I have good enclosures and run all my drives cool, 25-29C. Two 120mm case fans, one front, one rear.
I am guessing there isn't anything that can compete with the price-performance of just building another Linux box with 7 or so drives. Is there?
Never trust your data to any one box.
As for the solution, the cheap and easy option nowadays is to simply use stock motherboards - most will accomodate 4 SATA drives and up to 4 PATA drives with no extra work - and run Linux with software RAID on them. It's still a problem to boot from a RAID disk, so one can be set aside for that purpose. Motherboards have GigE nowadays, so speed is not limited by the network link. 300 GB drives are cheap, making a 1.5 TB server affordable if you acquire it piecewise over the course of a year or two.
Now duplicate this setup into 2 boxes and you're good to go.
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Maybe these are too big for your needs, but EcoByte makes very nice black-box storage boxes based around Linux and 3ware controllers. They offer excellent performance, SMB etc file sharing, web configuration etc etc. We use them at work and they are great. I guess initially you could just buy an empty box and populate it with the hard drives you need and then expand it further as you need more storage space.
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
RAID could help with downtime, but is not a substitute for backup, really. Tape backup is still very expensive (high inital cost), and DVD's are limited in both quality and storage capacity. Well, I use both, but then my storage needs are slight since I burn my most important data to a DVD-RAM disc every night.
What OpenBSD thinks about RAID:
The only non-obvious thing (i.e. a lot of people are telling you to do the wrong thing) is that you should use software RAID instead of hardware RAID. The cheapest CPU that you can buy, will still be 99% idle.
A less non-obvious thing (but some people still forget it) is that you want a well-cooled machine, because heat is what kills hard disks. Get a nice case; pretend you're building a machine that you wanna overclock like an 31337 h4xx0r, but then of course, don't really overclock it.
Oh yeah, and keep an eye on /proc/mdstat -- when your first disk dies, you want to know it happened, instead of finding out a year later when your second disk dies. (I use a lil' python script that displays the array status on a VFD using lcdproc. But there are lots of other ways to deal with it. Just make sure you deal with it somehow.)
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Recently I was also shopping around for a storage solution. At the store, I saw a promising looking device called the Netgear SC101. You pop any two IDE drives into it, plug an Ethernet and power cable in the back, and you have yourself a NAS. Because you can pick out your own drives, you can even do a terabyte in a cheaper and much smaller unit than 4 x 250 GB units like the Buffalo Terastation.
Unfortunately, where this device failed for me was that it doesn't just share the stuff as a SMB share like a real NAS box does. It uses some weird proprietary protocol, and only machines with the right drivers installed can talk to it at all. Such drivers aren't available for Linux, or Mac, or BSD... even versions of Windows that are old (98, ME, etc.) or 64-bit won't work. It has to be a 32 bit version of Win 2k3, XP, or 2k with the right service pack level for the drivers or no data for you.
No self-respecting geek would want a device with such limited compatibility. If a piece of network equipment only lists Windows in its compatibility, that normally means the manufacturer only officially supports Windows, or maybe you need Windows to set up and administer the thing. When even many versions of Windows can't access the device, it's a junker. I took it back the next day, and will start researching hardware purchases more carefully in the future.
In short, Netgear's short-sighted decision to use some strange proprietary protocol instead of SMB turns this unit from something I would have strongly recommended into that gets a definite thumbs down.
I own the X6 and love it.
- It's GBE is very fast.
- It supports raid-5 with up to 4 drives. (mirroring on 2 drives)
- You can just keep adding bigger drives. so it'll be highly expandable down the road.
- Supports SMB, NFS, FTP, etc.
It's $600 for the unit with no drives.
Check out the toms networking review, it's linked from Infrants site.
Dear CmdrTaco, I am sorry to have to announce this to you, but honestly I just don't care.
Love, this great guy.
ReadyNas X6 is very nice. It has support for upto 4 SATA drives and can grow the raid array if you want to only start with 2 drives. I would recommend this with the SATA 400GB western digital raid drives.
We just got a couple Buffalo TeraStation units at work. The software that comes on the CD is a peice of junk, but the unit itself seems good. The major drawback I've heard about it is that it's really slow in RAID5 mode. Not too big a deal for us, as it's a cache sitting in front of tape, so it's still a faster backup medium. It's obviously running Samba in the background, but it doesn't support NFS mounts. I don't know if that's a big deal for you or not.
The other company I've heard about is Infrant. Similar setup to Buffalo, only instead of being mistaken for a Bose subwoofer, it looks like a small radio circa 1920. It claims an impressive set of awards, but I don't know if it's any faster in the RAID5 department than Buffalo.
But, for home backups that are occurring overnight, and if you're not pushing 100+GB at a time, you're probably good with either. They're both, depending on capacity, between $800-$1,500.
You can hook up several hard drives (or other usb toys) via a usb hub. Performance is not great, but totally fine for storage of music and movies if you only have a few users on your network. It supports samba, ftp, nfs, http, probably any other way you'd like to access the files. You could do software raid or some other type of mirroring/backup if you'd like.
The main reasons I really like this thing for an at home server:
I was amazed at how quiet my office became after replacing my PC file server with this guy and PC firewall with a wrt54g. I could actually hear the gf talking again, which is the only downside so far.
-Lod
1. Buy a large tower case. Or use an old one. Whatever. Make sure there are lots of 3.5" drive bays.
2. Put in some kind of crappy, low-heat motherboard and CPU. Use the Celeron 300A you bought back in 1998. Whatever. Pop in 128MB RAM or so.
3. Buy a large, name brand PSU. Enermax, Seasonic, PCP&P, something like that.
4. Put in some kind of crappy boot drive. The 10GB drive that probably went with the Celeron 300A will be fine. Load Linux or Windows Server. Whatever makes you happy (yes, Windows Server will run on 128MB, especially if it's not doing anything but serving files).
5. Install a multiport IDE or SATA controller. Sil, Promise, Via, whatever. They're all OK. You want to be able to handle at least four drives. I prefer SATA at this point, 'cause I like big drives.
6. Speaking of big drives, 250GB disks are dirt cheap. Buy four of those. I prefer Samsung and Hitachi drives. We're using spanned 250GB drives 'cause 500GB drives by themselves cost four times as much.
7. Configure some a nice spanned, mirrored volume (RAID10 or the like). Two copies of a 500GB volume will be just fine. I prefer to use software RAID, in case I have to move the disks to another machine that doesn't have the same controller, but if you have a hardware option for RAID10, more power to you. Remember that RAID mirroring doesn't protect you from your own stupidity and cheapo PCI disk controllers never do RAID volume management.
8. Or don't mirror, and just use the second volume as a backup destination for the first.
9. Stick the resulting PC in a closet someplace. Administer with VNC or SWAT or RDP or whatever makes you happy.
Total cost for this project is probably $500 or $600, almost all due to the hard disks.
Alternatively, you could use an NSLU2 + a 500GB drive in a USB enclosure. That would also be a $500 setup, and there's no redundancy there.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
100 gmail accounts, GmailFS installed on your PCs, and highspeed innuh-net! ;-)
but what if his news services stops carrying alt.sex.pedophilia
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Not RAID, but on my network I have a Linkys NSLU2 with two identical external USB harddrives. It has built in SMB support and can be configured to do a full drive backup daily. Its not the most scalable solution but it is low cost and easy to maintain.
The NSLU2 runs Linux and can be hacked so that you can setup more complex cron jobs to do your backups, if desired.
I spent quite a while trying to find a perfect RAID NAS device for home use. Everything I came across was either ridiculously overpriced or grossly underpowered.
:)
My basic requirements are:
RAID 5 support
Extensive HTTP based admininstration
Samba, NFS, rsync share support (browsing files over HTTP - a plus)
Gigabit Eithernet Interface
20MB+ Read/write speed
Support from 1 to at least 4 SATA disks
Disks should be easily swappable
A few month ago I finally came across Infrant's ReadyNAS X6 box. Specs read like just what doctor ordered - everything I wanted seemed to be there. I got it and after 3 months of use I am not disappointed. I purchased 4 300GB Maxtor MaxLine drives and got about 850GB of NAS disk space. I use it as a primary storage for MythTV, backing up two laptops [rsync], and (obviously) the rest of my data which is now much safer on RAID. The box runs Infrant's custom Linux distro and (I think) Motorolla 350Mhz CPU. It has a dedicated XOR chip. Array upgrades are seamless - you can start with just a single disk, then to RAID 1 (add another disk), then RAID 5 (3 and 4 disks).
The only thing that I was hoping would be better was write speed - I get about 15MB sequential write and 25MB seq. read speed. After some digging, I get a feeling this is actually a problem with network card not being able to keep up with packets. If that's the case, I might be able to pop another network card in one avaliable PCI slot.
As far as price goes, Infrant's box and 4 300GB drives cost me under $1K USD which seems quite reasonable. I highly recommend taking a look at this unit if you are considering purchasing NAS.
BTW, I am in no way affiliated with Infrant, just a satisfied customer
"You mortals are so obtuse." -Q
LinkSys NSLU2. Plugs into your home network. (10/100) Then you get yourself 2 IDE drives and 2 USB 2.0 enclosures then plug them in. Then you can set it to periodically back-up one drive to the other. Sure, it's not as bullet-proof as RAID5. But it's dead simple, cheap, and it just works. Failure recovery is dead simple. Also, the system is has some of the same flexibility as the Buffalo Teraserver. (Plug in your friend's USB 2.0 drive when he comes over.)
Also, with this scheme, you can delete a file and change your mind. (Recover from the back-up before the weekly copy job.)
And, if this is too simple for your geek quotient, it's Linux-based and hackable!
Mod parent up.
I can't believe anyone would recommend anything else for a geek besides the NSLU2!!
It runs based on Linux, so you can replace the firmware
Not only do you have a NAS device, which you can mirror disks on, but then you can basically add on whatever you want, eg Firewall, web/mail/file server, music center, VOIP PBX, use NFS as well as Samba etc.
Tom's Networking has a little howto on this.
And if you're interested in more information, CmdrTaco I've found this other site where you can often find some good information from users about techy related stuff that matters.
So does Anonymous Coward have good karma?
So I have an NSLU2 at home. Had it for about a year. The length of time the thing has been actually useful is maybe two days. Let me give you the counterpoint...
- Silent operation, no fans in the nslu2 and you can get fanless enclosures for the HDs
Make sure it's an aluminum case at least. And be prepared to try several different ones until you find one that works well.
- Takes very little space away from your home office
No, other than the six thousand cords you've got hanging off the back of it to plug in these external drives.
Oh, and don't accidentally disconnect a cord. The NSLU2 doesn't support anything approaching to Plug and Play. You'll likely damage data on the drive, but the most annoying thing is you gotta shutdown and restart the whole thing.
- Very small power draw
True.
- Easy to add/remove drives without any reboots
Not in my experience.
- Can power off drives that aren't used frequently, then turn them on when needed
Again, not in my experience. This is most likely going to lock up the whole thing so it stops responding.
The other problems with the NSLU2 besides the speed(might as well hook it up to a 10baseT hub, cause it can't fully utilize 100baseT), is that if you do try to transfer a large amount of data(say 15 gigs of MP3s) more likely than not the whole thing will lock up on you.
In short... The NSLU2 is unreliable, for a variety of reasons mostly having to do with software, but also having to do with the external drives and the lack of support for hot plugging USB devices. The NSLU2 is slow. The NSLU2 is a pain to manage on the table because of all the cords hanging out of the thing. The NSLU2 is not well supported by Linksys, they periodically release firmware updates but 9 times out of 10 they don't help. The NSLU2 is particular about what type of USB enclosure you use, as well as even what drive, so it's hit or miss whether it will work.
To be fair, I did look at buying a Netgear SC101, and everything I have read indicates that it's even worse.
I ended up just taking my drives and sticking them on my computer and leaving them there. I thought it would have been nice to have this running all by it's lonesome in another room with some batch scripts periodically replicating data over to it. But it's simply not reliable enough.
I've been meaning to try to sell my NSLU2 on ebay. Maybe someone who wants to install their own copy of the nslu2 Linux on it can have some fun. But it's not a good device for a SOHO server, that's for certain.
Matched drives give you better performance but they are not technicaly required. Some raid cards might have checked for this but none that I have worked with. 3ware specificaly does not use a chunk of a drive so that different drive sized can be accomodated I have a 4 drive 2 maxtor 2 WD raid 5 on a 3ware 95xx and it works fine. Cheep windows mirror and stripe software "raid" controlers probably have this issue but it should work fine putting a larger drive in to replace the failling unit, as there logic is a simple write every block twice and say your as big as the first drive or write ever other block to each drive and say yours 2x as big. If your using a "raid" card that cheap you might as well use software raid and get a better feature set (expansion, raid level migration, raid 5 support and sub drive arrays for starters)
No sir I dont like it.
Just do what I did: buy a used server. I got a used Compaq Proliant with RAID 5+x, with room for a total of 12 drives. It was $450. Easy, cheap, and it works. No dicking around with software and shit necessary (unless, of course, your idea of a good way to spend a weekend is configuring software). And of course, the hardware is designed to work perfectly. I've got one in my business, and one at home.
I don't respond to AC's.
The ratings and reviews on their homepage http://www.infrant.com/ say it all. This thing blows a Terastation away in terms of ease of use, supported protocols, and goodies. Buy an empty ReadyNAS X6 from http://www.eaegis.com/ for $579 (no tax, free shipping). Fill it with two of whatever drive is dirt cheap this week (cough-newegg-cough). Here's the kicker...ReadyNAS will expand the drive array automatically each time you add a drive. So buy a couple 300GB's for $100 each and you'll have 300GB of mirrored storage. A few months from now, you run out of room, you just drop in another 300GB drive and now you've got 600GB of redundant storage. Add another drive and you'll have 900GB with redundancy. Still need more room? Replace those 300GB drives one at a time with higher capacity drives and watch it automatically resize the set to use the extra space. Without ever having to rebuld the array! Trying to backup a TB of data so you can move your NAS from 300GB drives to something higher really sucks the big one.
Of course it does CIFS(SMB). But it is one of the only NAS products to support Apple File Protocol, which is a must for networks with Mac/OS X users that insist on using filenames with colons, slashes and question marks and other things that make CIFS/SMB explode. It also supports NFS and rsync for the UNIX/Linux crowd and both FTP and HTTP for the web browser crowd (hi, grandma). It also streams in both flavors of home media server protocols (UPnP and the HMS) so you can buy a $100 Linksys media extender and watch anything you have stored on your RAID. It also has a SlimServer plugin for streaming music to those SlimServer devices that you can hook up to your stereo or a cheap pair of speakers.
It's also supports Gigabit with Jumbo Packets (write only currently) so you can copy 200GB of HD camera footage to the NAS in a couple hours instead of a couple days. The RevB case is cable-less with just thumbscrews between you and swapping a drive. It also holds the drives vertically because who is the idiot who thinks stacking heat factories horizontally on top of each other is a good idea. Also, I can't tell you how many RAID products only lets you specify an alert SMTP server name but no authentication information, which means e-mail alerts don't get delivered (boo Promise, boo 3Ware). ReadyNAS has its own MTA so the mail gets through without a problem, and it can also let you set login/password to authenticate to your ISP's SMTP server. It looks nice, clean, and it certainly not the noisiest thing I've had in my room, although I will be happy when future firmware lets you put the drives to sleep so the case fan can be completely turned off when you aren't using it.
I spend three weeks shopping for a NAS for my network, and I'm glad I looked past everyone telling me Terastation. I've had this ReadyNAS X6 for a few weeks now and I love it. I'm already shopping for a second so I can recycle the old drives from all my other rag-tag household systems into one nice neat package.
-JoeShmoe
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
Total overkill. Here is how to get a 250 Gb Raid 10 storange free of charge 1: Get 125 Gmail accounts 2: Get Google filestem 3: Job done
Check out Adaptec's Snap Servers. They used to be made by Quantum until Adaptec took them over. I have an older one I got off of ebay, added 4x 120Gb in a RAID5, and can get to the same shares via SMB, NFS, and allows from a host of other protocols. User-friendly, plug and play, and fast.
Don't these raid controllers want the drives to be the exact same model?
My 3ware couldn't care about model. It's the *size* that matters. The replacement drive has to be >= the size of the drive it's replacing.
http://slashdot.org/~tf23/journal
Once you understand that RAID is reliability strategy and are prepared to have appropriate backup measures in place, then RAID 5 becomes an attractive option for the home network. I've recently looked at several options.
In my case, a three disk RAID 1 solution proved more appropriate than RAID 5. I value high reliability on the home system and wanted to use a rotating third disk as a backup in the event of catastrophic data loss (e.g. house burns to ground). FWIW, I also use a DAT for differentiatial backups. For many users this may be overkill -- sacrificing three disks plus fixed hardware costs to greatly reduce potential data losses -- but for priceless coding projects and digital pictures, this might be good for you as well.
For some users working with video or having large audio collections, much larger disk systems may be desired. First make sure that you have an appropriate mechanism for backing up a terabyte or three. Then, the Vanguard V5 may be an excellent solution if the $2-3k price is acceptible.
Given one hour to live, the student replied: "I'd spend it with professor FP who can make an hour seem like a lifetime."
Write performance: insigificant. He said it was for archival use, so presumably it's a lot of reading and not so much writing. Besides, any reasonable RAID should be faster than a single disk, and with just two or three drives you'll be fast approaching the upper limit of gigabit ethernet (I'm presuming that Taco's house isn't wired with infiniband, though I suppose it might be).
Multi-disk failure: Well, you can still lose your RAID-10 if two disks from the same linear array fail, so you're spending a lot of money and not really gaining a whole lot - the 33.3% figure only applies to a 4-disk RAID-10.
If you've got 4 disks and are concerned about 2 failing, go RAID-6. You get the same capacity as the RAID-10 would get you (capacity * (n-2)), and you also have a 0% chance that 2 failed disks will take the array down. To increase capacity, you just need to add one disk at a time, too (after the initial 3), as opposed to the RAID-10, where you have to add in [at least] pairs.
get a 1 or 2 u rack mount case, a couple samsung 250gb drives, mini-itx mobo, openBSD, and roll your own. i started out in '98 using linux for my personal home server(redhat>suse>debian>redhat>fedora>openbsd), and without a doubt openbsd has been the most stable and the least problematic... i've been using it for the last 18 months, and the only reason for rebooting was when i experienced an extended power outage, when i moved, and when i added a new hard drive (because of a noisy case fan). http://www.doink.org/geeklog/public_html/article.p hp?story=20051212224355152
BIG TIP!!! get a frackin' UPS! i'm currently using an ancient APC smart 2200, but i've had fewer flakey problemsthe last three years i've been running with a UPS, and i think alot of it is just having clean power... of course my sysadmin chops might have gotten better as well, but i'm pretty sure clean power goes a loooonnnng way.
finally, as far as file sharing is concerned, i prefer netatalk cause i'm a long time mac user(as is my wife) and i've been a sysadmin in the graphic arts for a long time. netatal 2.0.x works very nicely on openbsd. but you should run whatever file sharing (netatalk, smb, nfs) is most conducive to your client OS.
i can't tell you which backup/archive is gonna be the best for you... if i could run legato networker on bsd cheaply, i would. i'm leaning towards bru for the time being, but i'd like to explore amanda some more.
good luck.
three can keep a secret, if two are dead - benjamin franklin
I don't know RAID 6 and 50 well enough to explain them, so the link will do the job. While I'm at it, they can do 10 (compare it to 0+1 to understand better)
RAID 6
RAID 10
RAID 50
-Turkey
Why choose a card (and the requisite set of drivers and/or other software) instead of a box that manages the RAID for you and presents a single drive to the host (like Raidweb boxes)? I don't work for Raidweb, but I know some of their customers and the people I know are satisfied with the devices.
If a home media jukebox drive fails, who will be at home to replace a drive with a cold spare? Do people normally build their card-based systems with fallback power supplies and a hot spare?
Digital Citizen
I've been putting together the specs for such a beast. I decided to go with SATA for cheap drives and "SATA-II" (or whatever you want to call it, since there isn't a standard name for NCQ and 3.0Gbps support) for future-proofing.
1) The natural first choice was 3ware. 12 port SATA-II controller (9550SX-12), for about $800. 3ware products are very well supported on Linux. The only downside is that it's a PCI-X device (this is NOT "PCI Express"!), and PCI-X busses are generally only found on very high end motherboards for servers and workstations. Any athlon motherboard or single-processor opteron board claiming to have PCI-X is lying, they really mean PCI express (AMD chipsets did not support PCI-X at all until around the time dual opteron motherboards were being created)
So since I didn't want to spend $500 on a motherboard that had built in scsi raid, support for 16GB of ram and dual opteron processors just to use that $800 card, I looked around some more...
2) And found a serious contender, the 12 port Areca 8x PCIe ARC-1230 (also about $800). While most low end motherboards don't provide an 8x PCI Express slot, they DO provide a 16x slot which will work just fine for this card (after all, this will be the fileserver, so a motherboard with crappy built in video will do, we're not playing Doom 3 here). Linux drivers are provided as source, even including a kernel tree patch which will build the driver into the kernel rather than as a module, making booting directly from the RAID controller easy.
Slap the Areca into Tom's Hardware's 37 watt computer (motherboard has built in GigE, but pentium-Ms are 32 bit processors, making giant files/filesystems a pain. An Athlon 64+cheap mini-ATX can be had cheaper, but uses more power), add in a stack of 10 watt 400GB WD Caviar Raid Edition 2 drives, and you're set for a very low power fileserver with a lot of storage.
Now, my turn to "ask slashdot":
Where do I get a 250-300 watt powersupply with 12 SATA power connectors?
Alternatively, do the SATA drive cages (like 3ware's RDC-400-SATA (pdf) have their own SATA power connectors built in and use standard molex connectors on the outside? Do I need special cages to support 3Gbps drives (ok, not a serious problem for now, but futureproofing)? 3ware's website says it'll work, their product PDF doesn't.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
..I'm getting an old Compaq rackmount server with a boatload of disk for nothing. Apparently, it's not longer useful because it isn't a multi-gigahertz platform. LOL!
My plan is to slap Solaris 10/x86 on it, fire up SVM and do a RAID 10 disk set with two hot spares. Hopefully, that will last me long enough that Sun T3s will come into affordability for homeusers.
Why SVM? Well, simple -- I use it all the time at work, and it will require minimal effort to make work. Assuming, of course, that SVM on Solaris 10 x86 is works the same as it does on Solaris 9/SPARC. Last time I ran Solaris x86 (version 7), I don't think it had the option to run DiskSuite (now called SVM).
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
I have mod points, but I feel it's more important to just correct you. He already has everything backed up and the LVM idea doesn't do anything to help his situation.
He does care about downtime. Downtime = time spent restoring. With a RAID level > 0, all he has to do is replace a drive and tell the raid to rebuild. He's done in 5 minutes. It would take that long just to queue up a restore job for the tape.
Hardware VS Software Raid
l Hardware-c.htmln ual/custom-guide/s1-raid-approaches.html. html4 349/2/
The $13 card you purchased is software Raid. Promise cards are mostly hardware RAID. I recently purchased a Promise FastTrack S150 SX4-M for less than $100 hardware RAID5 card compared to the $30-50 software RAID5 cards. I'm pretty satisified with the purchase but unfortunately there isn't room for much upgrade. I currently have 4x160GB in a RAID5 configuration giving me 480GB of space and 1 disc of redundnacy.
Some useful links to tell you the difference between software raid and hardware raid are:
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/raid/conf/ctr
http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/RHL-9-Ma
http://techrepublic.com.com/5100-10880_11-5715216
http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/tutorials/
HD Trailers
I would assume most of the users on here are quite linux savy (if not, ask a friend, they may be able to help, but prepared to supply beer and pizza).
.6tb of storage: /storage
/store/picturelibrary/ directory, and share my pictures with family .6tb volume.
:) ). Mine is in my basement, also has a cdrw on it (for quick doc backups), a 2gb orb drive (for quicker backups) and a shared printer.
l
:). The linux md device also supports a hot spare, which i recommend you consider if the data is important enough to you.
Rather than a dedicated cheap nas device, i decided to go with a DIY linux software raid array. The current linux software raid is pretty reliable. if your doing mission critical data, i recommend hardware raid instead however. To estimate this, try to attempt to guage the cost associated with re-gathering all your data, and spend at least 1/4 that much for your storage.
My solution was 4 200gb ata seagate baracuda drives in sw raid 5. the cost was about:
- 4 drives @ $125 cdn
- case & powersupply @ $100 cdn
- board, cpu, 512mb ram @ $200 cdn
total cost - 900$ cdn
i used the onboard ide controller for a 80gb os disk, and a separate 2channel pci ide controller for the 4 disks, in raid 5, giving about
achilles:/storage 559G 474G 86G 85%
i've been using this volume for about 1.5 years now with no problems *knock wood*. I've also rebuilt a sw raid 5 array at work, so i know that part of it works (for the most part).
A few benefits i find using linux rather than a hardware device:
- i can ssh/winscp in and get any of my files, anytime, from anywhere
- i can run apache, mounting my
- nfs or smb mount the volumes to any other linux/windows machines
- the geek satisfaction of having my own
my next step from this is to purchase 4-8 SATA drives, a 8channel sata controller, and go with that. One thing to consider, is the location of your system. With this many drives, it can generate substantial heat (and noise), so you probably dont' want it sitting in a warm location in your home, where you have to listen to it droning away (4 cudas make some noise
hope this helps! a good linux sw raid howto is at:
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-RAID-HOWTO.htm
One other thing. you can also use the mdadm tools to monitor the volume for any issues, and if/when they arrise, you can have it email you a message. This way you can pick up a spare 200gb drive on your way home from work to replace the failed one
dwight s.
You don't need 1000 CDs.
You don't need 500 DVDs.
You don't need hours and hours of shaking, badly focused home videos.
You don't need 5000 bad pictures.
(if you really do you know I am not referring to you).
Nobody is going to watch all that crap, and unless you have not got a life, you are included on that select group.
Prune your digital trash.
You will find that a moderate amount of disk space is more than enough to hold all your files.
If you want to make a datacentre of your home, go ahead and enjoy, but the lamest excuse is to house all those GBytes of data that are never going to be seen again.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
RAID 6 is pretty much the same as RAID 5, except that the parity is stored on two disks not just one. This is so that the array can cope with the failure of more than one disk.
:)
--
This executive summary was bought to you by cheese
In other words, "I want one really good basket to keep all of my eggs in." What... did they stop teaching problem-analysis in the CS dept after I graduated from Hope? {smile}
Might I humbly suggest that you buy/build/salvage a pair of inexpensive computers, each with a fair amount of RAM, a hard drive (or RAID 0) of your desired capacity*, and the fastest NIC your switch can handle. (Forget the fancy RAID controllers, and of course anything better than a PCI VGA card is wasted.) Install the OSOS of your choice on both. Turn on Samba on one of them: that one's your file server. On the other one, set up a nightly cron job to synch (without deletion) the shared directory on the first machine to its local copy of that data: that's your redundancy.
This solution effectively protects you from fried electronics, accidental deletions, and even small fires if the boxes are in different parts of the house (and if the whole house is going up, you get your choice of which box to run back in and rescue), scenarios in which the really-good-basket approach will still scramble your eggs.
*Consider getting different brands to reduce the likelihood of near-simultanous failure. I've had multiple drives from the same lot start failing within months of each other, and you don't want to have a second drive failure while you're still browsing for a replacement for the first.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I had a similar experience with the YellowMachine. It was advertised as 1TB RAID, but the fine print reads "on some models" and the ones I could actually find only gave 650G in RAID5 configuration. No big deal. But it's slow. SLOW. It's got an ARM processor that runs at 100 bogomips and it has 64M of RAM.Mounting is slow. ls is slow. I got it to store media files but I find I can't play mp3s from it unless I tell my player to cache the whole song (and forget about crossfade). It came with telnetd running and no ssh, but fortunately it was based on Debian Woody so fixes are easy. And boy has it required a number of fixes.
I'm thinking of doing something like you did--copying critical configuration info off of it and reusing its md in a faster x86 box.
I want my Cowboyneal
It's sort of ironic, I'm actually in the process of doing just this, but for work. The data is not mission critical data, but it's important enough that we need some redundancy.
Here's the basic solution:
1. Slackware linux
2. Multiple pairs of harddrives set as mirrors (raid1)
3. Combine these mirrors into a single volume with lvm
4. Share the volume using samba &
5. For easy managment, use webmin
I'm using standard IDE drives because their cheap, and we've got a half dozen laying about. One nice thing about raid1 on linux is that you do NOT need the two harddrives to match in size. The size of the mirror will be the size of the smaller of the two drives. LVM allows me to take a lot of the smallish mirrors (60gb-160gb) and combine them into one large volume (total is 580gb). Because of the mirror'ing, there isn't much concern about a single dead drive taking out LVM.
I'm running this setup with a Pentium III-733mhz w/128mb memory, and have found the only bottle neck to be the speed of the drives themselves. A suggestion about that: Make sure that the two drives of each mirror reside on different ide channels; this improves things noticeably.
peace,
nathan o'brien
There are some great posts on this topic in a past Slashdot discussion (Taco should've done his Googling ffs, it was only 2-3 months ago that the discussion in question was on Ask /.)
3 37226
The discussion in question http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/26/0
The basic idea:
Split drives into small partitions, say 20-25 GB each. Since most drives available now are a multiple of 50GB, I suggest going with 25GB or 50GB per partition. Make software RAID devices out of sets of these partitions, one on each drive. e.g. md5 = sda5 + sdb5 + sdc5 + sdd5. Take all of those smaller RAID drives, and then LVM them together.
I just set up such a system on my dad's fileserver back at home, and will be doing the same with a machine I'm building within the next week or two. So far my opinion is that this approach ROCKS.
There are more details on neat tricks you can do with such a RAID + LVM setup in the discussion I posted the link to. Among other things, if you have a 150GB drive and three 250GB drives, you can have four-drive RAID for the first 150GB of the drive set, then 3-drive RAID with the remaining 100GB.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I don't know about all you wackos with the 600$ CPU's and 600$ RAID controllers at home, but I have better things to do with my money. Like invest it rather than spend it on useless trinkets, theoretical seek-time figures and unused gigaflops.
/proc/mdstat is wrong.
Here's my brew:
1. Old PC. Any one would do, probbably even a good'ol P1. 128MB RAM is more than enough. I consider this FREE. I run a dual-PIII-450MHz that I have lying around.
2. 4x[BIG-SATA-DRIVE]. How big? When I built mine, highest bang-for-buck was 250GB. So I went with 4 of those.
3. 1x PCI SATA controller.
4. 1x PCI GbE NIC.
[3] and [4] are peanuts. [2] is worth, what, 500$?
The entire rig will easily give you ~10-25MB/sec, which is, for any home use I can consider including pumping 10GB files over the network, plain enough.
Plug any crap old 2GB or greater IDE harddrive in for sport (or two and do yourself a RAID1 configuration).
Install Linux.
Install SAMBA.
Configure RAID.
Set up healthchecks that email you if something in
[OPTIONAL]
1. Grab several old IDE drives. Not neccesarily same sizes.
2. Stick them in some other box (I did it on my windoze box cuz that's where I had case space).
3. Configure a RAID0, or better yet, a spanned volume. Use windoze dynamic disks, use LVM, whatever makes your boat float. Set up a compressed filesystem if you think that would help any. Usually, with the kind of things people store on huge arrays at home, it won't.
4. Do a daily dump of everything from your RAID to your backup array.
DONE. Forget about it and go do something better with your time.
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