Terabyte Storage Solutions? 574
DeMechman asks: "As many on Slashdot may know, storage is one thing which you can never have enough of. Given the current situation with CD/DVD rot (Personally I can attest to a 10% attrition rate) hard drives in a RAID configuration seem to be a better and more economical solution. If you own more than fifty CD/DVDs, it can be a daunting task to find a file. I am wondering if anyone has found a hardware solution that can inexpensively be set up to handle 10 or more 250GB HDDs in a RAID configuration. Primarily, has any case manufacturer tackled this niche market yet?"
What we do... (Score:1, Interesting)
We did it and have a couple now ... (Score:3, Interesting)
What I did... (Score:5, Interesting)
Unfortunatly, once you have all this space, you WILL find a way to use it all and need more. I put this system together about 10 months ago, and it's at 85% capacity now. I'm preparing to build a new server with 12 250GB drives, to have just over 4TB between the 2 systems.
Re:Terabyte Storage (Backup Solution) (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Terabyte Storage (Score:2, Interesting)
Not the most optimal arrangement because of the bus having two drives on each channel, but it doesn't seem to affect performance too much since it is striping the data across all of the drives. I'm assuming it stripes in order, so you'd want to stagger the drives such that 1 & 2, 3 & 4 are not on the same controller.
Have you worked with a 3ware card? Believe me when I say that this solutions' performance will suck compared to using a real raid solution such as a Escalade 3ware 9500s. Even on software raid, the 3ware card will kick it's butt (Hmm I not even sure 3ware's Hardware Raid is as fast as Linux software raid on a Fast system).
1) First you are using 2 cards per channel thus it only writes to one drive at a time on each channel. An 8 port 3ware card can write to all 8 at once.
2) The Promise Card is only an ATA 133 card not raid and doesn't support command queuing.
3) You are multiple cards which requires more IRQ requests, which in turn slows down overall system performance.
4) Promise support in Linux sucks. It's better now that it has been in recent years with Libata but it's still crappy promise hardware.
Re:It's not RAID, but ... (Score:1, Interesting)
Sometimes commercial is nice (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It's not RAID, but ... (Score:4, Interesting)
also, I beleive they don't even qualify as the badly named, raid0 as I under the impression that the disks are concatted together, not striped.
what I'd love to see is an Xraid mini as it were. something with much of the managability of the full size xraid, but not as much redundancy. so perhaps a nice desktop case (to match the g5 *of course*:) that could take 4 or 5 sata disks in hot swap caddies (maybe the same caddies as in the xraid) with a hardware raid controller on board for striping, mirroring and raid 5. a single gig ethernet on the back and then fw400 and 800 ports.
if it had the same cross platform compatibility as the the big xraid, same type of management tools etc, then it could be a big hit, and be an official filling for the big hole that is g5 storage.
sure, the xraid is great and cheap, but it's price of enhtry i still high when all you want is a terabyte or so of fast storage for one of two machines at home, ie no rack to place, no need for redundant psu's and fibre channel connectivity, that kinda thing.
HD video editors esp need something as for the data speeds they need for uncompressed hd (180MBps) thats 4 striped disks which you can't place in a g5 without using third party solutions.
just a thought, come on apple. and when you make one, I just ask for a fully loaded one for myself
dave
10% attrition? Change your brand, buddy. (Score:2, Interesting)
The CD-R brand must have something to do with it. I only use Sony's CD-R. Not for a particular reason. Only that none of them ever failed me.
Thus, my opinion is that CD-R are one of the bests (if not the best) solutions for non-industrial backups. By industrial, I mean freaking mission-critial multi-GB multi-millions dollars worth backups.
Note: I never tried DVD-R. You must code a *lot* of lines to make your projects' sources weight more than 700 mb. (Hum, quick cvs tree check: 75 mb... ok, I might be wrong here. However, these 75 mb were a *lot* of work for me...)
Re:What's "inexpensively"? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What's "inexpensively"? (Score:3, Interesting)
All you need is 1-2TB of cheap disks (Score:3, Interesting)
I use DVArchive with DVD or satellite to ReplayTV for video capture and play back, DVA is great for managing multiple volumes and dynamically discovers vidoes if I want to move them to another drive. It also supports copy/move between the two systems (I use a 1Gb switch between systems). CPU performance is not key for play back though it is critical for transcoding (I use a dual processor system for transcoding and it smokes my single CPU system).
I have a LARGE MP3 collection (forgive me for not publically admitting to its size) and I find the same systems/drives are ample for supporitng a digital audio library. I switched to iTunes for managing music (MusicMatch melts down when the number of files gets large) and stream it with SlimServer to squeezebox devices for high quality playback on home theater and other receivers.
My recommendation is to go with generic disk drives - brand names, 7200 RPM with 1-3 year warranties --I get them locally on sale for under $150, sometimes $130/250GB, thats 52 cents per GB, a little more per GB than a DVD-R disk but more reliable and infinitely more flexible. I can recreate a DVD off of the disk image if needed.
I am more concerned with heat and power consumption (it adds up) than disk performance, someone will need to explain to me why I'd need to mess with RAID for this...
SATA Setups (Score:4, Interesting)
I understand how CD rot works (Score:4, Interesting)
250 GB to 8 TB solution. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:3ware Controllers + Drive Friendly Case (Score:4, Interesting)
The reason why you're getting better RAID 5 results from software RAID vs. hardware RAID is because of the parity calculations involved with writing to a RAID 5 volume. On a hardware RAID setup, these are calculated on the RAID card itself, which probably has a 200 or 400 mhz. chip that does these calculations. Back when CPUs were only 400 mhz, this was great, because there was no load put on the CPU, and the RAID controller worked just as fast or faster than a software RAID setup. Now that CPUs are 3 ghz. +, there's no way a dedicated hardware RAID card can keep up, and unless you're running a huge load on the server, youv'e probably got 1 ghz. or so of free CPU bandwidth to burn for software RAID...
Want to see the performance really increase? Give up RAID 5 and go with a real RAID solution like RAID 1 or RAID 1+0.
Sun Microsystems EBay Setup for 1tb+ (Score:2, Interesting)
2x Sun Ultra 10 desktop machines (360mhz / 512mb / 2x 18gb drive (hot-pluggable drives)) @ 150.00/ea (EBay)
2x 3' HVD cables @ 28.00/ea
2x X6541A Sun Dual Differential Ultra/Wide SCSI @ 100.00/ea (EBay)
1x Sun StorEdge A1000 storage array @ 120.00 (EBay)
10x Sun Ultra2 SCSI Drive Sleds @ 58.00 (EBay)
7x Seagate - ST1181677LCV 188gb Ultra2 SCSI drives @ 550.00/ea (PriceWatch)
Total for 1,128gb of Raid-5 storage: $4584.00
The trick is, with this setup you will have two machines with redundant access to the drives and data in the array. The Ultra10 is enough to handle any home use I can think of, and paired with Solaris 9 or even Linux will be blazingly fast. I just think that it's more expensive than any comparable SATA setup... great for us Sparc lovers tho!
Hardware RAID (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.areca.us/IDERAID.htm [areca.us]
It takes up 3 external 5.25" bays and allows you to connect 5 3.5" drives. It provides expandable RAID 5, all internally with it's hardware and simply looks like an ATA or SATA device to the computer.
Has anyone here actually used one?
kiwi
--
System Architecture
Toshiba TMPR4927ATB 200MHz 64-bit RISC processor
64MB on-board cache memory with ECC protection
Areca 5 channels IDE controller (ARC600-66) with enhanced H/W XOR engine
NVRAM for RAID configuration & transaction log
Write-through or write-back cache support
Firmware in Flash ROM for easy upgrades
RAID Features
RAID level 0, 1 (0+1), 3, 5 and JBOD
Multiple RAID selection
Array roaming
Online RAID level/ stripe size migration
Online RAID capacity expansion and RAID level migration simultaneously
Automatically and transparently rebuilds hot spare drives
Hot swap new drives without taking the system down
Instant availability and background initialization
Automatic drive insertion / removal detection and rebuilding
Disk Bus Interface
Ultra ATA/133 compatible
5 channels, operating in parallel
5 hot-swap drive trays
48-bit LBA support allows disk exceeding 137GB
Staggering the Spin-Up of Individual Disk to Solve the Power-on Surge
Host Bus Interface
ARC-5010
Dual ATA interface-Ultra ATA/133 & Serial ATA 1.0
Ultra ATA/133 compatible Transfer rate up to 133MB/sec
Serial ATA 1.0 - 1.5Gbps(150 MB/sec)
ARC-6010
Ultra 160-Wide LVD SCSI; Transfer rate up to 160MB/sec
Tagged Command Queuing
Concurrent I/O commands
Re:In RAID, IDE has the disadvantage... (Score:3, Interesting)
IDE RAID hit mainstream over five years ago, when Adaptec released an IDE RAID card. This card happened to have four separate IDE controllers chips on it, and four cable connectors. I installed a solution using this card with four 73GB IDE drives from IBM (as big as they came in 1999, I think) in an 0+1 configuration. Mirrored striped sets, total usable capacity of 130GB, I think. (Not bad considering I had replaced mirrored 9GB SCSI drives.)
Wouldn't you know it, but one drive failed after three months. No problem, it was taken out and replaced with anohter (FedEx overnight from Dirt Cheap Drives) at a cost of 30 minutes after-hours downtime. And it was done by a technician who'd never seen the configuration before. I was overseas when it happened.
AFAIK, this machine (SuperMicro dual PPro 200, 384MB RAM) is still chugging along, running Windows NT Server 4.0, doing its thing as a file server for an engineering department who still haven't filled it up.
(What was it you were saying about IDE RAID?)
Re:we made LOTS of 1.3 TB boxes at about $2000 eac (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What's "inexpensively"? (Score:4, Interesting)
The reason they gave is that the even a fraction of modern CPU performance still far outclasses the chips on hardware RAID cards. Also, data cached on the card still has to go over the PCI bus, but data cached in RAM... well, it's already available.
A RedHat employee who was there confirmed that RedHat has seen the same thing in their own testing. For performance go with software RAID. With anything over about a 800Mhz CPU, you would be hard pressed to notice the CPU use.
In fact, unless you are doing something that is virtually entirely computational like SETI@Home, you are going to be generating a fair amount of output. Enough that the faster disk IO actually increases your speed more than what would be gained by moving the RAID load to seperate hardware. It also lets you spread disks over a couple SATA controllers and potentially multiple PCI buses (if your MB supports it.)
Re:we made LOTS of 1.3 TB boxes at about $2000 eac (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:3ware Controllers + Drive Friendly Case (Score:3, Interesting)
How on Earth is RAID 5 "less real" than RAID 1 or 10 ?