[CentOS] eSATA drive enclosure of a full PC?

Sun Feb 21 14:52:21 UTC 2010
Stephen Harris <lists at spuddy.org>

> 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?

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

-- 

rgds
Stephen