HI All,
I have a dilemma and I would appreciate advice
1. Get a good size case, mobo, processor, etc and put 8 hard drives it in and RAID them. (yes an 8 port SATA mobo). Running CentOS.
or
2. Get an eSATA enclosure that has room for 8 or 10 drives and just connect it to box?
I know that RAID is not a full proof backup, but I am looking for a solution to store all of my data, projects, music, etc, etc
Can I get thoughts for ideas for solutions?
Thank You -Jason
Slack-Moehrle wrote:
HI All,
I have a dilemma and I would appreciate advice
- Get a good size case, mobo, processor, etc and put 8 hard drives it in and RAID them. (yes an 8 port SATA mobo). Running CentOS.
or
- Get an eSATA enclosure that has room for 8 or 10 drives and just connect it to box?
esata enclosure will be on a single SATA port, which will be a bottleneck for 4 or more drives. maybe even for 3 drives. 8 or more drives should be on a 4 channel SAS port at least.
how about getting something like a QNAP and putting your storage on the network?
for instance, http://www.qnap.com/pro_detail_feature.asp?p_id=134
On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 7:17 AM, Slack-Moehrle <mailinglists@mailnewsrss.com
wrote:
HI All,
I have a dilemma and I would appreciate advice
- Get a good size case, mobo, processor, etc and put 8 hard drives it in
and RAID them. (yes an 8 port SATA mobo). Running CentOS.
or
- Get an eSATA enclosure that has room for 8 or 10 drives and just connect
it to box?
I know that RAID is not a full proof backup, but I am looking for a solution to store all of my data, projects, music, etc, etc
Can I get thoughts for ideas for solutions?
Thank You -Jason _______________________________________________
If you're building something on the cheap, then you could get an even cheaper setup with a 4port SATA motherboad, and an add 4port SATA PCI / PCI-e card.
Some of those eSATA enclosures will use 1x SATA port per HDD, and some even work on USB which is even worse.
If you can run each HDD on it's own port, you'll get optimal performance. For a cheap in-office storage, I use these: http://www.google.com/products/catalog?hl=en&safe=off&q=icy+dock&...
It's basically a hot-swap cage, but I need to manually tell the OS that the drive was removed, since it doesn't run on a server back-plane. But it does the job as far as cheap storage goes :) Put 4x 2TB HDD's in there and you have 4TB storage on RAID10
- Get a good size case, mobo, processor, etc and put 8 hard drives it in and RAID them. (yes an 8 port SATA mobo). Running CentOS.
or
- Get an eSATA enclosure that has room for 8 or 10 drives and just connect it to box?
My recommendation is the 2nd option. I ran the first for a couple of years and was always suffering disk failures because you really really need good air-flow to keep that many disks cool.
I recently got a Sans Digital TowerRAID TR8M-B - 8 Bay SATA to eSATA; this shows up as two buses on the PC (which CentOS sees nicely) with 4 devices on each bus and I can run RAID5 and LVM on the disks as normal.
(partial output of lsscsi)
[6:0:0:0] disk ATA ST31000340AS SD15 /dev/sdc [6:1:0:0] disk ATA ST31000340AS SD15 /dev/sdd [6:2:0:0] disk ATA ST31000340AS SD15 /dev/sde [6:3:0:0] disk ATA ST31000340AS AD14 /dev/sdf [7:0:0:0] disk ATA ST31000340AS AD14 /dev/sdg
These are the 5 disks I have in the TowerRAID
Stephen Harris wrote:
- Get a good size case, mobo, processor, etc and put 8 hard drives it in and RAID them. (yes an 8 port SATA mobo). Running CentOS.
or
- Get an eSATA enclosure that has room for 8 or 10 drives and just connect it to box?
My recommendation is the 2nd option. I ran the first for a couple of years and was always suffering disk failures because you really really need good air-flow to keep that many disks cool.
If you're going to raid together than many disks, you've got to keep them cool, which a standard case (no matter now many drive slots it has) generally doesn't do very well. My recommendation would be to get a Supermicro case or something similar that is designed for raid.
On 2/22/2010 8:48 AM, Bowie Bailey wrote:
Stephen Harris wrote:
- Get a good size case, mobo, processor, etc and put 8 hard drives it in and RAID them. (yes an 8 port SATA mobo). Running CentOS.
or
- Get an eSATA enclosure that has room for 8 or 10 drives and just connect it to box?
My recommendation is the 2nd option. I ran the first for a couple of years and was always suffering disk failures because you really really need good air-flow to keep that many disks cool.
If you're going to raid together than many disks, you've got to keep them cool, which a standard case (no matter now many drive slots it has) generally doesn't do very well. My recommendation would be to get a Supermicro case or something similar that is designed for raid.
The trayless hotswap enclosures that others have suggested that fit in the space where 5" drives would go generally have their own cooling fans. I've used a unit from Startech and swapped one of the drives out of a raid weekly for an off-site rotation without any trouble for over a year now. You do need a big tower case that could take 5" drives all the way down, but it's nicer than having cables and power off to an odd-sized external box and very handy to not have to open the case to trade drives once it is set up. If this is a single-user PC or even a media server for a few people at once you probably don't have to worry about extreme speed issues and would get along fine with an 8-port PCI-X or -E card.
Les Mikesell wrote:
On 2/22/2010 8:48 AM, Bowie Bailey wrote:
Stephen Harris wrote:
- Get a good size case, mobo, processor, etc and put 8 hard drives it in and RAID them. (yes an 8 port SATA mobo). Running CentOS.
or
- Get an eSATA enclosure that has room for 8 or 10 drives and just connect it to box?
My recommendation is the 2nd option. I ran the first for a couple of years and was always suffering disk failures because you really really need good air-flow to keep that many disks cool.
If you're going to raid together than many disks, you've got to keep them cool, which a standard case (no matter now many drive slots it has) generally doesn't do very well. My recommendation would be to get a Supermicro case or something similar that is designed for raid.
The trayless hotswap enclosures that others have suggested that fit in the space where 5" drives would go generally have their own cooling fans. I've used a unit from Startech and swapped one of the drives out of a raid weekly for an off-site rotation without any trouble for over a year now. You do need a big tower case that could take 5" drives all the way down, but it's nicer than having cables and power off to an odd-sized external box and very handy to not have to open the case to trade drives once it is set up. If this is a single-user PC or even a media server for a few people at once you probably don't have to worry about extreme speed issues and would get along fine with an 8-port PCI-X or -E card.
True, and I'm using a trayless hotswap enclosure for off-site backups myself. What I like about the Supermicro cases is that everything is there and you don't have to worry about it. Everything is hotswap, the SATA is already there to support the drives, and it has plenty of cooling and power (frequently redundant power supplies).
It is a bit more expensive to go that route, but you know everything is solid.
-
Bowie Bailey -
John R Pierce -
Les Mikesell -
Rudi Ahlers -
Slack-Moehrle -
Stephen Harris