I posted a thread on this to FedoraForum, but got only one response whom I have to email back with some questions on their post, but I thought others on the mailing list might have some opinions on this issue also.
Here's my original message from the forum. I look forward to some good discussion on this. ==========================================
I'm about to reuse some old hardware to create a sizable RAID storage server at home to get all the data I care about in one place and protected. The hardware I'm going to use is an old P3 500MHz system I have which has an A-Bit BE6 motherboard and 256 MB of RAM in it. If I don't have to replace the motherboard that would be great, but if I must, I must.
I'm planning on running FC3 or FC4 on this box using two 40GB IDE drives which will be software RAID1. Also, I will be upgrading the RAM to 512MB.
I will be purchasing 5 300GB Seagate SATA hard disks (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822148064) to be housed in an AIC 5 bay hot swap disk chassis (http://www.excaliberpc.com/AIC_AC_5SATA_BR-SS35_HOT-SWAP_/partinfo-id-55412 6.html). Please keep in mind the picture shown is in the wrong position. The chassis is positioned so that the drives are seated vertically in the case. I'll also be sliding a fan under the chassis in the 5.25" slot for additional cooling of the drives, and another fan to draw in air at the bottom front of the computer case. (The one reply I received in the forums stated that I would have better luck with these Western Digital drives (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822144394). Any thoughts on this drive versus the Seagate drives. I was going to go with Seagate since I've been having good luck with them and they offer a 5 year warranty as opposed to the 3 years that Western Digital offers.
I'd also like some recommendations on a good SATA RAID controller to use here. I was going to use the 3ware 9500S 8 port controller, but it's PCI64 and I don't think the A-Bit motherboard supports that, but if I have to get a new Motherboard, then so be it. Can someone recommend a good SATA RAID controller that supports RAID 0/1/10/5/JBOD and has full, on the fly, hot swap drive support?
I also know that I'm going to need a new power supply to handle 7 disk drives, so I'll be replacing the 200W unit with 400W one. Will this fry my motherboard at all, or does it not matter? (The one reply to my post recommended this Thermaltake 480W unit --> (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16817153007)
I'm interested in people's thoughts on the scheme as a whole and thoughts on the SATA controller card. If you've actually done something like this, I'm very interested in your thoughts and comments on your experience the specs of what you did. Hey, I'm interested in any thoughts on this at all. Comments on the components I'm planning on using, alternatives you might think are better, anything. The only components I'm really stuck on are the drives as the Seagate SATA drives are pretty quiet. I will be keeping the server in an unoccupied room, but I don't want to build a jet engine that I can hear thoughout the house either.
Thanks, Paul C.
I'm about to reuse some old hardware to create a sizable RAID storage server at home to get all the data I care about in one place and protected.
Keep in mind that RAID only is not 100% safe. Think of a wrong delete action, power surge, or something that will take out every drive in your system. If you want to be 100% safe, you must create backups.
Good luck,
Joost
On Sat, 2005-08-27 at 10:52 +0200, Joost Waversveld wrote:
If you want to be 100% safe, you must create backups.
Again, what is the media to store upon? - As we here have discussed, no such an one! - Even good expansive DVDs are stored eternally, as say, Verbatim, promises...
Paul Crossman wrote:
I'm about to reuse some old hardware to create a sizable RAID storage server at home to get all the data I care about in one place and protected. The hardware I'm going to use is an old P3 500MHz system I have which has an A-Bit BE6 motherboard and 256 MB of RAM in it. If I don't have to replace the motherboard that would be great, but if I must, I must.
I'm planning on running FC3 or FC4 on this box using two 40GB IDE drives which will be software RAID1. Also, I will be upgrading the RAM to 512MB.
OK: I assume that "reliability" is going to be a major factor. (Some Abit boards of that age have had capacitor leaks: be warned.) You know there'll probably be issues upgrading memory much further.
Is speed important to you? What sort of network connection are you planning on getting?
If you're limiting yourself to 100 base TX [1], then that's going to be your limiting factor. For most data (especially Oggs and the like), that's plenty.
If you're planning on gigabit Ethernet, remember that data is going to have to come off the hard drives, through the PCI bus, be encoded, and then go back through the same PCI bus to get to the network (given the motherboard in question). I'd expect something in the region of 40 MByte/s throughput if everything goes well.
Plain PCI isn't enough for gigabit ethernet speeds when that's the only thing on the bus.
I'd also like some recommendations on a good SATA RAID controller to use here. I was going to use the 3ware 9500S 8 port controller, but it's PCI64 and I don't think the A-Bit motherboard supports that, but if I have to get a new Motherboard, then so be it. Can someone recommend a good SATA RAID controller that supports RAID 0/1/10/5/JBOD and has full, on the fly, hot swap drive support?
You should know about http://linux.yyz.us/sata/faq-sata-raid.html , and check http://linux.yyz.us/sata/sata-status.html and http://linux.yyz.us/sata/software-status.html . The latter says that Linux libata does not yet support hot-swap: that rules out a *lot* of hardware.
Otherwise, I would expect the Pentium 3 to be able to handle soft RAID as well as this card handles RAID: you might find that using a cheaper SATA adapter (or two) and soft RAID does the job as well.
A PCI64 card *should* work in a 32 bit slot, if there isn't anything physically in the way. The "Updated Motherboard compatibility list" available from http://3ware.com/support/index.asp lists a lot of (newer) motherboards and says to use the 32 bit 33 MHz PCI slots they provide.
One thing to watch out for: I have found that there are some modern PCI cards that won't work in BX motherboards. (A PCI Radeon 9250, for example).
But I have no experience with the 3ware card.
I also know that I'm going to need a new power supply to handle 7 disk drives, so I'll be replacing the 200W unit with 400W one. Will this fry my motherboard at all, or does it not matter?
Shouldn't matter. If it does, then it was time to replace the motherboard anyway: its power circuits were dodgy.
Hope this helps,
James. [1] 100 Mbit/s? Slow?
James Wilkinson wrote:
Paul Crossman wrote:
I'm about to reuse some old hardware to create a sizable RAID storage server at home to get all the data I care about in one place and protected. The hardware I'm going to use is an old P3 500MHz system I have which has an A-Bit BE6 motherboard and 256 MB of RAM in it. If I don't have to replace the motherboard that would be great, but if I must, I must.
I'm planning on running FC3 or FC4 on this box using two 40GB IDE drives which will be software RAID1. Also, I will be upgrading the RAM to 512MB.
OK: I assume that "reliability" is going to be a major factor. (Some Abit boards of that age have had capacitor leaks: be warned.) You know there'll probably be issues upgrading memory much further.
Is speed important to you? What sort of network connection are you planning on getting?
If you're limiting yourself to 100 base TX [1], then that's going to be your limiting factor. For most data (especially Oggs and the like), that's plenty.
If you're planning on gigabit Ethernet, remember that data is going to have to come off the hard drives, through the PCI bus, be encoded, and then go back through the same PCI bus to get to the network (given the motherboard in question). I'd expect something in the region of 40 MByte/s throughput if everything goes well.
Plain PCI isn't enough for gigabit ethernet speeds when that's the only thing on the bus.
I'd also like some recommendations on a good SATA RAID controller to use here. I was going to use the 3ware 9500S 8 port controller, but it's PCI64 and I don't think the A-Bit motherboard supports that, but if I have to get a new Motherboard, then so be it. Can someone recommend a good SATA RAID controller that supports RAID 0/1/10/5/JBOD and has full, on the fly, hot swap drive support?
You should know about http://linux.yyz.us/sata/faq-sata-raid.html , and check http://linux.yyz.us/sata/sata-status.html and http://linux.yyz.us/sata/software-status.html . The latter says that Linux libata does not yet support hot-swap: that rules out a *lot* of hardware.
Otherwise, I would expect the Pentium 3 to be able to handle soft RAID as well as this card handles RAID: you might find that using a cheaper SATA adapter (or two) and soft RAID does the job as well.
A PCI64 card *should* work in a 32 bit slot, if there isn't anything physically in the way. The "Updated Motherboard compatibility list" available from http://3ware.com/support/index.asp lists a lot of (newer) motherboards and says to use the 32 bit 33 MHz PCI slots they provide.
One thing to watch out for: I have found that there are some modern PCI cards that won't work in BX motherboards. (A PCI Radeon 9250, for example).
But I have no experience with the 3ware card.
I also know that I'm going to need a new power supply to handle 7 disk drives, so I'll be replacing the 200W unit with 400W one. Will this fry my motherboard at all, or does it not matter?
Shouldn't matter. If it does, then it was time to replace the motherboard anyway: its power circuits were dodgy.
Hope this helps,
James. [1] 100 Mbit/s? Slow?
As I am planning the same thing, I have found that looking at all the "good" RAID cards will require a new motherboard that can handle PCI-X based adapters which rate as the fastest. This is an issue for multimedia that I want to do. Of course, if you look around, you can purchase hardware to support the RAID card for a reasonable price.
The case is an issue as I want the case to fit within the stereo stand and allow the addition of drive in the future.
Review of RAID adapters. http://www.tweakers.net/reviews/557 Some of the cards come with Linux drivers.
At present I am going to use software raid.
On Wed, 2005-08-31 at 11:11, Robin Laing wrote:
As I am planning the same thing, I have found that looking at all the "good" RAID cards will require a new motherboard that can handle PCI-X based adapters which rate as the fastest. This is an issue for multimedia that I want to do. Of course, if you look around, you can purchase hardware to support the RAID card for a reasonable price.
The case is an issue as I want the case to fit within the stereo stand and allow the addition of drive in the future.
Review of RAID adapters. http://www.tweakers.net/reviews/557 Some of the cards come with Linux drivers.
At present I am going to use software raid.
What is your tolerance of noise? A while back I built a system that is now located with my TV. It has four 300GB harddrives. I did not use RAID for this configuration but did build a 1TB file system using LVM for use with mythtv.
For the most part the system I built is not distractingly noise. But I am more tolerant of that than most I think. About the only time I hear it is after shows are recorded it starts the commercial flagging process. This increases the load on the processor which causes the fans to spin up faster. Almost sounds like it is rewinding a tape for a few minutes.
With seven drives you will want to make sure you have adequate cooling and select drives that are known to be quite. If you don't have good cooling the life span of your drives will be impacted.
Scot L. Harris wrote:
On Wed, 2005-08-31 at 11:11, Robin Laing wrote:
As I am planning the same thing, I have found that looking at all the "good" RAID cards will require a new motherboard that can handle PCI-X based adapters which rate as the fastest. This is an issue for multimedia that I want to do. Of course, if you look around, you can purchase hardware to support the RAID card for a reasonable price.
The case is an issue as I want the case to fit within the stereo stand and allow the addition of drive in the future.
Review of RAID adapters. http://www.tweakers.net/reviews/557 Some of the cards come with Linux drivers.
At present I am going to use software raid.
What is your tolerance of noise? A while back I built a system that is now located with my TV. It has four 300GB harddrives. I did not use RAID for this configuration but did build a 1TB file system using LVM for use with mythtv.
For the most part the system I built is not distractingly noise. But I am more tolerant of that than most I think. About the only time I hear it is after shows are recorded it starts the commercial flagging process. This increases the load on the processor which causes the fans to spin up faster. Almost sounds like it is rewinding a tape for a few minutes.
With seven drives you will want to make sure you have adequate cooling and select drives that are known to be quite. If you don't have good cooling the life span of your drives will be impacted.
Ah, noise. What a pain. Of course there is heat and ....
I am looking at Peltier coolers and having the equipment behind a door. Then I have to deal with the issue of getting the heat from the heat sinks.
If they are good enough to be used in auto AC systems (trial), then it should work in my stereo system.
http://www.digit-life.com/articles/peltiercoolers/
I don't find the noise of a computer that bad but I am older and my ears are not as good as they used to be. :)
On Wed, 2005-08-31 at 11:48, Robin Laing wrote:
Scot L. Harris wrote:
With seven drives you will want to make sure you have adequate cooling and select drives that are known to be quite. If you don't have good cooling the life span of your drives will be impacted.
Ah, noise. What a pain. Of course there is heat and ....
I am looking at Peltier coolers and having the equipment behind a door. Then I have to deal with the issue of getting the heat from the heat sinks.
If they are good enough to be used in auto AC systems (trial), then it should work in my stereo system.
http://www.digit-life.com/articles/peltiercoolers/
I don't find the noise of a computer that bad but I am older and my ears are not as good as they used to be. :)
That may be what happened to my ears as well. :)
I have actually seen some of those Peltier coolers used in a product before. Fairly impressive. Not sure how cost effective they would be for a computer case, and as you mentioned you need to cool down the heat sinks. I initially had some heat problems with the system I mentioned before, not enough air flow around it in the cabinet. So make sure you have some kind of airflow through the cabinet and watch how much other electronic equipment you have stacked above and below the system.
-
James Wilkinson -
Joost Waversveld -
Paul Crossman -
Robin Laing -
Scot L. Harris -
Strong