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Turnkey Linux RAID Solutions? 110

Posted by Cliff from the low-maintenance-data-options dept.
Total-Gig-Age asks: "I want to buy an expandable RAID system for home storage of large media files (music, film, and photo). I'm absolutely unwilling to rely on optical discs (bit rot, not always online) and un-RAID-ed hard drives (unsafe: if it fails, you're screwed). The thing is, I don't have time to shop for and configure a RAID system myself, and I want a turnkey solution that will just work out of the box. I'm aware of Apple's XServe, but $6000 for 1 TB is just too expensive. What are my best options if I want to buy an open source system that I can maintain and upgrade if need be? Any recommendations on a full set of components, so that I don't have to spend a week shopping? Trustworthy online companies? Can I trust a local store to do it for me? Is it better to keep the server as a separate machine? Finally, how much should I expect to spend if I want something that doesn't suck (for 1TB say)? I can find plenty of info on how to set up RAID on the Internet, but I just want to be told what to buy so I can get on with other things, even though I could probably handle setting the whole thing up myself if I had to."
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Turnkey Linux RAID Solutions? More

Turnkey Linux RAID Solutions?

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  • nevermind the "if it's important, then $$ shouldn't matter" argument

    is $6k just too much, or is 1TB just not enough disk space for $6k? in other words, if you could get 4TB for $6k, would would consider it?

    • Re:$6k/1TB too much? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by DShard ( 159067 )
      Considering that a sata card with eight channels is roughly $500 and 6 $200 gig drives can be had for less than a grand I would say that for a home/small office $6k is to expensive for what you get. considering file/print services can be handled very well by the cheapest processor on the market, a total system can be had easily for half that with full support. 4TB is a different situation since you need a lot of io channels and I would think that, realistically, $6k is too cheap.
      • but he's looking for something that works out of the box

        otoh, if he's ok building it himself, then $6k is a lot. but for something out of the box, perhaps not
      • lessee...
        8 port 3Ware 9500 controller : $500
        400G Seagate sata disk: $350

        400GB * 3 = 1.2TB

        you we need 4 disks and one controller for 1.2TB of raid5

        500 + 350*4 = $3400

        add the motherboard and processor ($600), and you have a system for $4K

  • You know why it costs more, right? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by beegle ( 9689 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @02:06PM (#11679254) Homepage
    You want good quality, but you don't want to pay for it. Ummm, right.

    Quality comes at a price. Everybody learns this eventually. With a DIY solution, the price is your time. You can make something really great if you're willing to burn a weekend or two on it.

    If you're buying something, you can have "moderately expensive, stable, and really limited", "really cheap, but likely to fall apart or catch fire", or "really expensive and really flexible".

    The other thing that you run into with a sommercial system is the difference between home and business requirements. For a business with a machine room, dust, humidity, and temperature are easy to control. A noisy unit is fine. Under your desk, temperature and dust build-up will be a problem, and the thing'll sound like a jet engine.
    • sommercial - adj - The business of psychoactive drugs.

      sommercial - n - An advertisement for soma.

      Source: A Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
    • Quality comes at a price. Everybody learns this eventually. With a DIY solution, the price is your time. You can make something really great if you're willing to burn a weekend or two on it.


      Well, many of us might have a weekend or two. Probably fewer of us have $6K for an xserve just laying about.

      Yes, of course, there is a cost associated with your time. However unless someone is paying you for every minute of your day, you have access to your own time.

  • Promise UltraTrak SX4000 (Score:5, Informative)

    by Yonder Way ( 603108 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @02:11PM (#11679325)
    I got a couple of Promise UltraTrak SX4000 4 Channel External RAID Enclosures at $WORK to evaluate and while they aren't fast enough for me to move a production Oracle server to, they are plenty fast for a home media server and are quite affordable.

    Each enclosure presents itself as a SCSI drive. You can chain enclosures together and use LVM to make them available to one (or more) filesystem(s). Hardware RAID takes place within each enclosure, but not across them.

    Mine were set up with four 300GB drives which, after RAID5 overhead, gave me 900GB of usable space per enclosure (I had two enclosures). You could easily use 400GB drives and have 1.2TB per enclosure if you wanted. I would think that total cost for the enclosure with 400GB disks would be around $2500 US.
    • Seeing as the arrays present as SCSI drives would it be possible to do a software RAID 1 (striping) across multiple arrays providing one large faster array?
      • Yes, it is possible to do hardware RAID across them. But RAID 1 is not striping; it's mirroring. I think what you're after is RAID 0. I think that you can accomplish the same effect with LVM, though.
    • Take a generic low-end PC (say, sempron 2200, with a pc-chips or ecs motherboard, 128MB DDR -- it's all overkill at this point) in a tall, well-ventilated case with at least 300W power, for about $150, and add 4x 250GB IDE drives, for about $450. Run as raid 5 on a debian sarge install. That gives you 750GB of online storage suitable for streaming media for about $600. When 400GB drives fall to the same $0.40/MB price point, make a new box and sell the old one on ebay, to pay about half the cost of the
      • Perhaps you're missing the point. The SX4000 is a scalable device that presents the four disks as one SCSI disk, and the whole thing can be scaled tremendously (especially if you have multiple SCSI controllers or multi-channel controllers). All of this can show on one PC.

        What you're talking about saturates the resources of a single PC, and has to squeeze into the confines of one chassis. It is more or less only scalable to the 4x400GB mark and then falls flat.

        • Re:Promise UltraTrak SX4000 (Score:1, Funny)

          by Anonymous Coward
          I think YOU are missing the point. Just how scalable of a system do you need to store your pics from your last visit to the Star Trek convention?

          Retard.
        • I agree with everything you said, but would note
          that by adding PCI RAID IDE controllers, it scales
          to the available case cooling and mount points.
          I'd probably add some mounting brackets from
          erector set pieces and a few fans (and maybe some
          acoustic insulation to my closet!!) if I wanted to
          scale up to, say 12x400. But that really is the
          wall for my personal taste, 3.6TB of RAID 5.
          If I ran out of erector set pieces, I'd just pick
          up an old gutted tower server case for the job
          from ebay or axe-man.

          I'd peg the 3.6
      • That is a great solution, but it's the antithesis of "turnkey" and is likely the complete opposite of what the "ask slashdot" poster was looking for.
    • I've had a horrible experience with 2 ultratracks-

      The controller decided to flag 1 drive in a raid5 as out of sync, (the drive was perfect) then in a few mins. bring it back online and decide that all other drives were out of sync and needed to be rebuilt based on the 1st drive it just de-synched. All the while happily reading the 1st drive's data incorrectly.

      On both accounts (after much pressing) promise engineers said the firmware immolated itself. This was all during a few months of uptime on the firs
      • Western Digital drives in a RAID config.

        Against my spidey-sense I made a few arrays out of the 100 and 120 gb ide offerings from WD- Some did not like being on the controllers (promise and 3ware), some needed a huge ammount of extra power to boot and not recaliberate/reset or spin down(!).

        In the end, all 20 are now dead after 2 years of use, the first 15 failed in the first 6 months (and yes all were oem).

  • Re: (Score:1, Redundant)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • And when the house burns down??? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by linuxwrangler ( 582055 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @02:16PM (#11679390)
    Sure, RAID helps - go grab a 3Ware card for your machine and mirror your data. But things like RAID and dual power-supplies are really in their element when system-availability is important. Ths system keeps running and you can hot-swap the drive or schedule off-hours down-time.

    For keeping your data safe, however, RAID is mostly useless - something you will come to realize when the house containing your RAID burns down or when the RAID is stolen by burglars or a human/software glitch manages to "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/yourdisk" your RAID. Power-surge, tornado, flood...the list of things against which RAID fails to protect is long.

    If you really care about your data you _must_ perform regular backups and take them off site. I rsync my photos to my work machine and use a VXA tape drive for regular backups.

    And I don't bother with RAID except on servers at work.

    • Furthermore, RAID won't help you a bit with filesystem errors or if individual files get accidentally deleted or corrupted.

      That's why we run tape backups every night.
      • A good journalling filesystem (NTFS, XFS, ReiserFS, JFS) is pretty resistant to errors. You're right about the danger of human error, but as usual that isn't part of the discussion.
      • That's why you set up weekly, nightly, and several times daily snapshots. That way if human error or file corruption occur, you'd be at most losing a few hours worth of work. It's fairly easy to implement with OSS software such as rdiff-backup, or more expensive but less resource intensive solutions are available. If you have money to burn, you can buy a NetApp and hardly have to worry about data loss ever again.
    • You hit the nail on the head. Some minor points:

      I rsync my photos to my work machine...

      Not an option for everybody -- most work machines are behind firewalls. Fortunately, there are a lot of online backup companies [google.com].

      ...and use a VXA tape drive for regular backups.

      The kind of solution every geek should have -- you really want regular restore points for your whole system. Alas, at $1K, not within everybody's budget. (My whole setup cost me about $1K.) There used to be a lot of cheap tape cartridge drives

      • I rsync my photos to my work machine...

        True, but it is an option for me (small company, I run all the machines, company owner is a friend, etc.) It doesn't have to be work. I have friends who backup to each others' machines.

        Alas, at $1K, not within everybody's budget...

        And that's why you have to get your equipment requests in early when the dot-com goes bust. :)

        Seriously, a couple of big drives in hot-swap carriers is a pretty attractive backup option these days.

    • I'll second 3ware. I've had problems with Promise and their "fake" raid, changing chipsets ever 5 minutes and breaking compatability, etc.

      3ware isn't cheap but you get what you pay for. High-quality, great performance, great support, and it "just works" with Linux.

      I've had issues with several brands / chipsets of onboard SATA controllers, which is why I went with 3ware. Software raid is all fine and good if you can get reliable drivers! If not, then avoid it.

      With 1T of storage, you are talking quite a fe
      • Yeah, I finally decided that they named the company "Promise" 'cause they kept "promising" me that the advertised Linux drivers would be available next month. They said that for 2-3 months in a row and when they finally told me that they were planning to beta test them in a month or so I sent the card back, put in a 3Ware and everything installed smoothly with no muss or fuss. Good thing I wasn't desperate for that server at the time.
    • Perhaps the cheaper RAID would enable him to afford a good tape backup system and offsite storage.
    • The easiest solution against theft/fire/physical problems is a few larger capacity sata/eide drives in scsi/firewire enclosures.

      You can rsync/backup/incremental backup to those, and make a weekly drop at your bank's safety deposit box.

      Depending on the # of drives/enclosures and your directory structure in your raid setup you may be able to put your /pictures on one drive and /music on another drive, etc etc.

      This gives you offsite backups. Sure a tape system that could backup everything each nite would be
    • we have a winner.

      Repeat after me...

      RAID IS NOT A BACKUP.

      Here's how I do my backup....

      1. I have a computer with 2x200 GB drives mirrored.
      2. I do an incremental backup of the data on these drives every other day to DVD-R discs. (I do not keep the discs for more than 6 months)
      3. Every other month I do a full backup and take it off site. (Safety deposit box)
      4. I rsync my critical data every four hours to an offsite server which is backed up to tape every night.

      Most of the data that I back up is not c
    • Certainly an interesting point. But... what backup device out there is affordable to the average person that can backup a terabyte or more of data without human intervention? I think the current answer is: none. At this point, I've relegated my backups to a second set of drives. So far, I've lost 9 gigs of data out of 225 gigs due to simultaneous disk failures on both the /mnt/data and /mnt/backup filesystems. Until there is some way for me to throw at least a terabyte of data onto a tape or some other
  • I use software RAID for most installations. Hardware RAID comes with a high price tag and is a pain to manage (not to mention that the on-disk formats vary not only between vendors but also models, so replacing a dead RAID card can be troublesome at best). Avoid those cheap hardware IDE RAID things; they're cheap because they're slow and not very reliable--software RAID in Linux is quite reliable and fast. Depending on your budget and storage requirements, you could go with IDE or SATA drives (you'll pro
    • I guess this really isn't a turnkey solution... Sorry. You might try Snap appliances, but I suspect turnket solutions are going to cost way more than you could really justify for personal/home storage.
    • Yes, software RAID is great (effective, flexible, reliable, comparable in performance to cheap hw RAID) and we use it at our work but never would we deploy it for a customer... You say hardware RAID is a pain to manage? Compared to what? Surely not Linux software RAID! Are you kidding?

      When the HDD fails with hardware RAID, you rip the drive out, replace it, and it starts rebuilding.

      Linux software RAID only works on a per-partition basis.

      When the HDD fails with Linux software RAID, you have to repartition

  • $6,000 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by vasqzr ( 619165 ) <`vasqzr' `at' `netscape.net'> on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @02:20PM (#11679446)

    The thing is, I don't have time to shop for and configure a RAID system myself, and I want a turnkey solution that will just work out of the box

    You're paying $6,000 because Apple does the work for you.

    I suppose you could get a tower PC, and fill it with hard drives and setup RAID. Cheaper? Yea. Reliable? Yea. But there's more to it than that.

    I googled for 'building 1TB server'

    http://www.martinandalex.com/blog/archives/2005/01 /building_1tb_ra.html [martinandalex.com]

    Home 1TB RAID Server
    CPU Athlon 3200+ $199 Frys 11x multiplier, should over clock to 2.6GHz easily
    Memory 1GB Corsair 4400C25 $275 Very fast at DDR466
    Motherboard ASUS K8N-E Deluxe $149.99 Frys, 6 SATA RAID chips on Motherboard, 3GB memory
    Case SUPERMICRO Beige 4U Rackmount Chassis, Model "SC742T-550 Beige" $307.50 New Egg. Has 7 SATA backplane built in
    CD drive NEC 3500A $67 newegg or zipzoomfly
    system drive WD740GD $185 10000 rpm system drive
    Data drive Maxtor DiamondMax 10 250GB $149.99 ($.59/gig vs $.68/gig for 300GB) 5 of these bad boyz

    total: $1933.48 or less than $2 per gig for RAID. Half the cost of white boxes and 1/3 the cost of anything from the channel.

    Here's another article, more information

    http://www.ethics-gradient.net/myth/storage.html [ethics-gradient.net]
    • Good googily moogly, did you just suggest someone OVERCLOCK the CPU for a RAID solution? Please tell me you were joking... high reliability != overclocked. (I also find the memory suggestion a bit high for your average home use, but that at least isn't madness.)
  • How about the Buffalo Terastation [buffalotech.com]? Only $1k.
    • I'll be purchasing one of these as soon as they become available. I pondered the building my own thing and the thing is, I don't need to dedicate another machine to this. I can set this up as an appliance and not worry about it. It's always there and running. Price is on the high side, but you pay a premium when you buy anything that just comes out.
    • The one main thing that concerns me about the Buffalo Terastation is the fact that while the client software has support for Windows, Apple, and Linux, the setup utility only has support for Windows.
      • do you need to run the setup utility? I would wager it's like the "instant setup" programs that come with NAT routers. If you want to click-through and have it work, then you need windows, but if you don't mind spending 10 minutes configuring it manually, then you can use any OS with a browser.
  • There's two popular RAID cards for the PC. I'm most interested in Raid-5 because the obvious cost-per-gig savings vs. mirror (raid-1) solutions.

    1. httP;//www.3Ware.com [slashdot.org]
    2. http://adaptec.com/ [adaptec.com]

    The 3ware is quite popular, but the adaptec wins in my book because it will do several things the 3ware one will not:

    a. On-line expansion: the ability to expand your array without backing up the data to another location, reconfiguring the array, and reloading the data.
    b. Differently sized disks: if I have 2 dis
    • Don't even look at the Adaptec ATA-RAID cards, they are mostly based on the crappy Highpoint chipsets that do pseudo-RAID. What you want is a 3Ware card.

      Look to eBay for deals, I managed to get a 3Ware 7820 (I think, it is 8 Channel PATA) for a hundred bucks. Currently I have 2 120G drives attached to it for my main system drives, and I plan on getting 6 more 250-300G drives to build a second array on the device.

      The 3Ware cards (mostly, they have one cheap RAID 1 or 0, 2 channel card) support RAID 0, 1,
      • 1. Please cite your data source.
        2. Adaptec cards claim to do their raid computations in hardware, meaning the system CPU isn't required to do the computations. This is much better than software raid solutions for obvious performance reasons.
        3. As I said, the differentiating factor is the ability to grow a setup by adding a disk, without the need to back up the data to another location. Can 3Ware do this? Last I checked (about 2 months ago) they could not.

        Adaptec has a good reputation for quality part
        • 3. As I said, the differentiating factor is the ability to grow a setup by adding a disk, without the need to back up the data to another location. Can 3Ware do this? Last I checked (about 2 months ago) they could not.

          Yeah, that's the bitch with the 3ware cards. My 8500 can't expand. I heard the newest cards, with their still-beta 3dmd2, can do expansion, but I can't verify that on my own.
      • It's true, the Adaptec 1200 series are dumb psuedo raid, but the 2400 series are real raid cards. I looked at both and went with 3ware at work because of better linux support. I just wish it was fully hotswap.
      • LSI megaraid is another really decent options. Cards are between $100-$350 bucks, and get it with sata or scsi support, option for PCI-X, hardware raid-5 whole shebang. Excellent drivers.
        • I had a very bad experience with LSI SCSI RAID in an IBM zSeries.

          Between me, customer's software vendor who built/configured the thing, IBM, Microsoft and the local IBM maintenance reps - we couldn't turn off write-back cache. At all. Windows 2000 had "couldn't disable write-back cache" errors spewing all over the system log every 10 seconds until I applied a hotfix so that now it was only once per minute.

          The IBM guys actually said "We're not that familiar with LSI RAID". He had a simulator in front of hi
    • If you're running differntly-sized disks, well, then you're not the person hardware RAID is aimed at. Linux software RAID will handle different size disks and will handle online expansion. I'd still get the 3Ware card, and just use it as a fancy disk controller (you'll want more than 4 drives in your system, either way). The 3Ware controllers are faster, better supported, and generally nice devices. They've got a pretty decent web admin iterface too, IMHO, though I regularly forget what port the thing's
  • What you really want is a NAS box. Your foolishness about dropping the R-bomb proves your mental inadequacy.

    Look for "Snapserver" or, my fave, the Iomega p410u. In a pinch you can netboot it with bigger hard drives, but by default you get >300GB of raid-5 with hot-swap IDE. and with gigabit ethernet, who cares.

    Anyway, for mass storage, get to eBay

    (note: yeah, yeah, eBay eats babies)
  • Maybe it's just me... but I'd be a lot more interested in buying an X-Serve RAID if I could just put it next my PowerMac. I need that sort of storage for my photography files but I don't have a rack system and I don't want one. Just another PowerMac box only with the RAID array inside would be great.
    • There is a product called Xtrovert by Xtrememac which solves this problem. It attaches to an Xserve RAID unit to turn it into a stable, vertical tower. It is made from anodized aluminum with a matte silver powder coat finish that matches Apple's aluminum products. It costs around $280 bucks.

      One source is here: http://www.smalldog.com/product/43611 [smalldog.com]

  • This is not a stupid question... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by egarland ( 120202 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @02:56PM (#11679851)
    Whenever a post about inexpensive Linux based RAID storage comes up on slasodot there is a flurry of:
    • "You know why it costs more, right?"
    • "if you want easy, you pay for it, if you want cheap, you work for it"
    • "if it's important, then $$ shouldn't matter"

    and other nonsense excuses for not answering the question.

    I'm guessing people have spent a LOT of money on reliable storage solutions and tend to be irrationally dismissive of the possibility of inexpensive redundant storage.

    The fact is, if you know Linux well, maintaining a Linux based RAID array for home use is perfectly reasonable and generally quite painless. I build an inexpensive 4 drive 480GB RAID array a few years ago that I've been delighted with since. I have survived a disk failure with minimal downtime and no data loss.

    "And when the house burns down?"

    I'm so tired of this stupid argument. Data loss due to fire will happen with or without RAID. The fact is, losing a disk is much more likely than having your house burn down by a very large margin (I'd take a rough guess that disk loss in a 8 disk system is about 10,000 times more likely than disk loss from fire). But even if they happened with the same frequency you'd still be reducing your exposure by 50% by eliminating data loss from disk failure with RAID.

    I have yet to find an online company selling properly configured systems for a reasonable price.

    I thought about building a standalone storage server recently and saved my design in a newegg wishlist [newegg.com]

    For rack mount RAID systems I like the design cases they have at www.rackmountpro.com but I've never dealt with them personally so I can't say how well they work.
    • Why are you putting dual Athlon 64s into a file server? That's 20% of your cost right there.

      • Well, you could write a Samba VFS module or something of the sort which automatically intercepts video media and re-encodes it to Ogg Theora on the fly or something I suppose...

        (You know, I was joking when I started writing that, but the poster DID say it was for storing "large media files" - maybe he DOES intend to do some sort of server-side processing of the files...)

    • "And when the house burns down?"

      I'm so tired of this stupid argument. Data loss due to fire will happen with or without RAID. The fact is, losing a disk is much more likely than having your house burn down by a very large margin (I'd take a rough guess that disk loss in a 8 disk system is about 10,000 times more likely than disk loss from fire).

      You're taking that arguement too literally. The point is that there are many things that proper backups can protect you from that RAID cannot. For example, the

    • I have yet to find an online company selling properly configured systems for a reasonable price.
      There's the
      Terabyte Network Attached Storage [buffalotech.com] which looks neat, though not rack mountable :(
    • I have yet to find an online company selling properly configured systems for a reasonable price.

      And that's what he wanted, or have I mis-understood 'turnkey'...?

      The fact is, if you know Linux well, maintaining a Linux based RAID array for home use is perfectly reasonable and generally quite painless. I build an inexpensive 4 drive 480GB RAID array a few years ago that I've been delighted with since. I have survived a disk failure with minimal downtime and no data loss.

      Whenever my employer (and I don't
    • The fact is, if you know Linux well

      The fact is, if you know linux well, then you don't need to bother asking Slashdot.

      If you -don't- know linux well, then the price that you pay will be your free time. Setting up your first stable (and properly backed-up) LVM system can be quite time-consuming. For some people, it's not fun, so spending an extra thousand dollars is a better deal than losing a few weekends.

  • LaCie F800 (Score:4, Informative)

    by kinema ( 630983 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @03:09PM (#11679996)
    LaCie [lacie.com] recently announced their F800 [lacie.com] desktop RAID solution. 1.0, 1.6 and 2.0 terabyte models are available. The array connects to a host computer via IEEE1394 (Firewire) or USB 2.0. The array can be configured as RAID levels 0, 0+1, 5, and RAID 5+hot spare. PriceGrabber [pricegrabber.com] lists [pricegrabber.com] the 1.0TB version for just under US$1500 and the 1.6TB for US$2700.
    • From the LaCie site:

      "total capacity for RAID 0, 50% of total capacity for RAID 0+1, 75% of total capacity for RAID 5, 50% of total capacity for RAID 5+spare"

      So their 2TB setup is more like 1 or 1.5TB if you want any kind of data safety. It also must be using the bleeding-edge Hitachi 500GB drives, which haven't proven themselves yet--I don't think they're even shipping.
  • You haven't really made it clear whether you want 1TB worth of raw disk, or 1TB of mirrored (or mirrored and striped) RAID volume. 1TB of raw disk shouldn't cost $6000 (in fact, you can get a single-CPU Xserve G5 with 3x400GB disks for under $5000, and that's got actual processing capability, not just storage) but unless you just do RAID 0 striping (which gives you speed, but not redundancy) you may wind up with less than 1TB. RAID 1 mirroring will give you redundancy, but you'll lose lots of disk space.
  • You didn't say:
    1. How much money you want to spend, just that $6k is too much.
    2. How fast you want it.
    3. Whether or not it needs to be quiet or has to run in an unairconditioned garage.
    4. Whether or not you want a "headless" server or a Linux box with vga and keyboard 5. Why you're willing to maintain and upgrade it but not build it.

    In short, you're probably not a geek else you'd be digging into this and figuring it out yourself. Or at least asking better questions.

    • No, he shouldn't ask those questions, because this is "Ask Slashdot" not "Flame me into oblivion becasue I've tried to ask a complex question in a single paragraph"

      Oh, and your comment of "In short, you're probably not a geek" just makes me think; grow up and move out of your mothers basement becasue I can't WAIT to see you get a new asshole ripped in the real world.

      Honestly, its numnuts like you who really piss me off.

      To paraphrase; there are no stupid questions, just stupid answers. You know what, that
      • Fuck you poser. As to being in the real world, I was fixing minicomputers when you were pissing diapers. I have a 2 million dollar company of my own and a 1/2 million dollar house. What have you got?
        • I'm betting he's got a dick bigger than 1/2"... Much unlike you are sounding to have.
        • I'm sorry madam, you appear to have dropped your handbag, would you like me to pick it up for you...

          And your reply obviously goes to show my initial comments concerning your unecessary flaming. Grow up.

          (oh, I live in a £750,000 home... thats about 1.5M of your dollars, thats because I wasn't fixing minicomputers when you were "pissing diapers", I was busy).

          Honestly, what a prick
  • I actually think that the XServe returns quite a bit for what you pay them. You can DIY for perhaps 1/4 of the price & a lot of time & some cursing. If you want a cheaper solution, I have been fairly happy with a recent purchase from eRacks [eracks.com]. If you want something a little more end, get a SNAP serve or something similar. Or, get a couple of those 1 TB external disks & use software RAID 1.

  • mmmm (Score:4, Funny)

    by Fr05t ( 69968 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @04:05PM (#11680638)
    mmmmm turkey *drool*.. oh you didn't say turkey? :(
  • The thing is, I don't have time to shop for and configure a RAID system myself, and I want a turnkey solution that will just work out of the box. I'm aware of Apple's XServe, but $6000 for 1 TB is just too expensive. What are my best options if I want to buy an open source system that I can maintain and upgrade if need be?

    Well, clearly what you should have done was to pay me < $1,000 for the sweet sweet dot-bomb (sort of) leftover that I donated to charity last week. Too late, so sorry--RedHat installe
  • Promise UltraTrak SX4000 - $1150
    4x Hitachi 7K500 500GB drives (should be out RSN) - $1200-1500
    A good U160 SCSI card for one of your computers - $200.

    For about $2500-3000 (half the price of an Xserve RAID), you can have 1TB of RAID0+1.
  • Rather than buy a turnkey RAID solution, buy a cheap machine and a nice tape drive. Use the cheap machine as your media server (no RAID), and use the nice, big tape drive to make the necessary backups. As other people have mentioned, there are a lot of bad things that RAID doesn't protect against, but off-site backups do.
  • I want something similar. I'm probably going with a firewire raid tower.

    I only want to use the disk on one machine so NAS is overkill.
    I only need moderate speed so SCSI is out.
    I need >1gb of logical drive space.
    I want hot swap.
    I don't need to run another OS, just a dvice to manage the array and connect to my desktop.

    Cost is likel to be around $2k. I might get lucky on ebay but it's unlikely.

  • SAN? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Dr.Dubious DDQ ( 11968 ) on Tuesday February 15, 2005 @05:43PM (#11682181) Homepage

    I'm looking for a roughly similar "solution" - adequate performance with redundancy and lots of storage space. A "SAN" ("Storage Area Network" - one of the current buzzwords going around these days) might be useful.

    Either iSCSI (if you want economical and standards-based) or Fiber-Channel (if you're wealthy and the speed of writes to the hard drive array is critical) based boxes of hard drives seems to be an option, and from the point of view of the server (or whatever computer is using them) they are just another hard drive. Or so the materials I've read say. (Think of them as an external RAID box...)

    iSCSI seems to be limited to 1Gb speeds (unless you can get your hands on 10Gb ethernet cards and switch, which I gather are now available), which to me seems perfectly adequate for most file-server type uses. It looks to my still-new-to-the-area eye that you can also do a lot of potentially useful tricks because of the standard IP-based nature of the data transfer (such as being able to mount a "hard drive" directly over the internet or a LAN, if you have some reason to need to do so). Fiber-channel is faster (2Gb seems to be typical, 4Gb is apparently getting fairly established, and 8Gb is available if you're made of money) but requires specialized and fairly expensive hardware ($500+ for each fiber-channel interface card at the LOW end, as I recall, plus several thousand for the fiber-channel equivalent of a "switch".)

    On the subject of iSCSI, there seem to be active projects with both "target [sourceforge.net]" (iSCSI device server) drivers and "client [sourceforge.net]" (iSCSI device mounting) drivers for Linux on Sourceforge...

    Corrections welcome, of course...

    Incidentally, that's not to be confused with "NAS" ("Network Attached Storage") which as far as I can tell is a buzzword used by people due to the fact that "file server" doesn't sound "cool" any more...your "NAS" might be using a "SAN" to store the drives that it is serving...

    In any case, this may be me trying to "hijack" this Ask Slashdot, but what do people here think of the "SAN" concept and its implementations?

    • Most of the SAN implemtations I've seen have used 2Gb FC_AL (Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop).

      As long as all of the FC devices you use have fabric support, all you need a SAN filesystem and perhaps a metadata server and you're good to go.

      One sample setup would be this:
      Brocade FC switch
      Xserve RAID (just the RAID box, not a server)
      Mac w/ FC card
      PC w/ FC card

      The Mac, PC, and RAID box are each plugged into the FC switch. Now either machine can access the RAID directly through this FC SAN. There is no need for
    • I'd also like to add that most SANs serve one or two purposes:

      1) SPEED! No need to access the data through a server. You can connect directly over fibrechannel.

      2) Server redundancy. You might want to keep your data on a hardware RAID-5 box, such as the Apple Xserve RAID. You could then have two servers connected to the RAID. One server would be doing all of the work while the other would be a hot backup. In the event that the primary server dies, the secondary server could mount the RAID and take over. (T
  • Ive said it before and ill say it again! RAIDCORE!!!

    Everyone seem to think that raidcore is not in the game, but i am telling you that it ROCKS.

    The standard line is that it is software raid. This is not the case. You can boot and run dos off of a raidcore with no drivers. The only reason i say this is to underscore that there is no REQUIREMENT to do software raid with this board.

    They DO have a driver which allows a software ASSIST to increase speed of the XOR calculation if you have the spare c
  • You could try installing a Coraid [coraid.com] box, which has a 10 disk chassis for $2500. You can load any disk you want, and attach it over the network.
  • I just want to be told what to buy so I can get on with other things

    Congratulations! Your application to PHB candidate school has been accepted. A rewarding career awaits you.

    Just kidding, of course. This kind of SAN device should be as ubiquitous as a TV. Unfortunately the general consumer doesn't know (s)he needs one, and the market isn't scrambling to provide them. Yet, hopefully.

    $0.02,
    ptd

  • You have a couple options for how to go with this. The hardest requirement you've got is capacity expansion: even many high-end RAID cards won't let you do that, though the feature is becoming more common. If you want to save money, you might want to reconsider that requirement. But you can still "emulate" the feature, though what you get won't be quite as good. Basically what you do is set up a regular, non-expandable array using something like RAID5. Then, when you need more space, you build another
  • I did this - see So I'm buildin a fileserver [slashdot.org].

    My only complaints with my 3ware card:

    1) no live expansion
    2) haven't had much luck running 3dm/2 with Fedora Core 3 and my 8500-8 card.

    Other then that, it's been great. The entire family uses the server for various needs. And knowing that all of our digital pictures are that much safer is nice.
  • Hi,

    I just ran out of space on my old raid array (two 200GB drives in a gentoo linux machine with software raid 1 mirroring.) I also was inspired by the slashdot story about someone who did a iPod shuffle raid using a usb hub... and since I just ordered a mac mini, I wanted to do something similar, but with actual hard drives. The screenshots of the OS X raid configuration in the disk tool sold me on the idea.

    I checked out Tom's hardware for hard drive enclosures that could power and connect some cheap

  • ...Buffalo's Terastation. Check this [buffalotech.com].

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