My partner and I work with video... and we were sick of backing up our projects to tape.
This is what I just set up for our home office.
I had a old server case (Antec) with a p4 2.8Ghz in it. It had previously had a raid5 array of 3 x 40GB disks + a hot spare that was used for video production.
I added a gigabit ethernet card, a cheap 2 port SATA controller and an external sata back plate (to connect one of the SATA channels externally). I purchased 3 x 250Gb seagate HDDs and put 2 of them into these SATA only (no USB no Firwire) external enclosures. Because they have minimal electronics they are very cheap ($AU55) and because it it SATA all the way very fast.
I installed centos and partitioned the drive with 4 partitions (//boot/swap/home). I used samba to share a user under/home which we can write to from our Macs, Windows and Linux laptops.
I disconnected the internal drive and installed centos again on each of the external drives to ensure that the partition structure is the same (I know i could have used DD but i didn't). Then I reconnected the internal and left one external connected.
Every 2 hours (it's not left on 24/7) the machine uses rsync to backup the internal drive to the external drive. It writes a log which include a df -h to the share so all users can confirm the backup process is working. Each week we swap the external drive for the spare which we keep in a fireproof box.
If the hdd in the machine ever fails all we need to do is swap it for the most up to date external. As we fill the 250GB we will archive off projects to offline pairs of external drives.
This gives us a double redundant simple to restore file server with true backup.
I still have some issues, especially with speed. It takes WAY to long to backup 100GB over the network... I figured it would take a few hours... but it seems to take closer to a day... not sure if it is the PCI bus not dealing with the back up to disc happening at the same time as the large file transfer over the gigabit network... or a poor configuration of samba/smb...
In the mountains about 45 minutes drive south of Mudgee, New South Wales, Australia...
Minimum temperature it ever gets to is around -10 degrees celcius, maximum around 43 degrees celcius. Annual rainfall of around 800mm. Altitude around 1500m. Lots of sunshine ans wind.
A laptop has a lot of components a file server doesn't need, it encloses everything in a very small case and uses a powerful fan to cool things down. I'd rather take all the components out and move them into a larger case with passive cooling.
You are correct to point out that the important thing is quality power management.
I don't really want to use laptop drives because of their expense per meg. I like the idea of conserving power by segmenting my storage and using very good powermanagement to spin down the drives that don't need to be running.
I didn't mention the scale of our system because we haven't built it yet. We have a budget of around $AU40,000 ($US30,00) for power generation and storage. At this stage a combination of solar, wind and a diesel generator as backup.
This should provide plenty of power, but I still want to reduce power consumption wherever I can.
Thanks for the link to SolarPC, excellent resource
Cheers
Nick
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My partner and I work with video... and we were sick of backing up our projects to tape.
This is what I just set up for our home office.
I had a old server case (Antec) with a p4 2.8Ghz in it. It had previously had a raid5 array of 3 x 40GB disks + a hot spare that was used for video production.
I added a gigabit ethernet card, a cheap 2 port SATA controller and an external sata back plate (to connect one of the SATA channels externally). I purchased 3 x 250Gb seagate HDDs and put 2 of them into these SATA only (no USB no Firwire) external enclosures. Because they have minimal electronics they are very cheap ($AU55) and because it it SATA all the way very fast.
I installed centos and partitioned the drive with 4 partitions (/ /boot /swap /home). I used samba to share a user under /home which we can write to from our Macs, Windows and Linux laptops.
I disconnected the internal drive and installed centos again on each of the external drives to ensure that the partition structure is the same (I know i could have used DD but i didn't). Then I reconnected the internal and left one external connected.
Every 2 hours (it's not left on 24/7) the machine uses rsync to backup the internal drive to the external drive. It writes a log which include a df -h to the share so all users can confirm the backup process is working. Each week we swap the external drive for the spare which we keep in a fireproof box.
If the hdd in the machine ever fails all we need to do is swap it for the most up to date external. As we fill the 250GB we will archive off projects to offline pairs of external drives.
This gives us a double redundant simple to restore file server with true backup.
To do this I mostly used this howto
Cheers
Nick
I still have some issues, especially with speed. It takes WAY to long to backup 100GB over the network... I figured it would take a few hours... but it seems to take closer to a day... not sure if it is the PCI bus not dealing with the back up to disc happening at the same time as the large file transfer over the gigabit network... or a poor configuration of samba/smb...
any hints?
del.icio.us/cicada for more useful links on this topic.
In the mountains about 45 minutes drive south of Mudgee, New South Wales, Australia... Minimum temperature it ever gets to is around -10 degrees celcius, maximum around 43 degrees celcius. Annual rainfall of around 800mm. Altitude around 1500m. Lots of sunshine ans wind.
Cheers
Nick
You are correct to point out that the important thing is quality power management.
Cheers
Nick
Cheers
Nick
I want to avoid laptop drives, because the cost per meg is just too high. I'd really like a system that just powered down the drives it was not using.
I use Ubuntu on my laptop, but the power saving setup hasn't been working exactly flawlessy. Do you have any more info on powersaving linux distros?
agee with Mr Coward there... laptop drives are not my choice... good power management is.
I don't really want to use laptop drives because of their expense per meg. I like the idea of conserving power by segmenting my storage and using very good powermanagement to spin down the drives that don't need to be running.
This should provide plenty of power, but I still want to reduce power consumption wherever I can.
Thanks for the link to SolarPC, excellent resource Cheers Nick
Read the post.. I want this as file server... not a video encoding machine.