|
I remember hearing a couple of years ago that buying hard drives in bulk could net some pretty good deals. Is that still the case? Where would one go to find that sort of thing?
|
# ? Jul 28, 2008 03:21 |
|
|
# ? May 11, 2024 11:06 |
|
Supersonic posted:I just ordered a D-Link DNS-323 and a 640GB Western Digital drive to go along with it. It should arrive sometime this week, and I'll post how it works as a replacement for my existing storage server with a 160GB and 80GB drive. Perfect. Im actually planning to get the exact same setup except with 2 640gbs. I'm a little worried about potential heat problems though.
|
# ? Jul 28, 2008 10:00 |
|
I wish there was a way to add a parity drive to an existing 3 drive array in zfs. Would make migration so much easier
|
# ? Jul 28, 2008 14:35 |
|
Thanks to some happy circumstances I'll be getting 4 750GB drives, and I figured I'd put together a nice Raid 5 fileserver. Is it a better idea to include the OS partition on the Raid, or to put it on its own, dedicated drive?
|
# ? Jul 29, 2008 05:21 |
Bender posted:Thanks to some happy circumstances I'll be getting 4 750GB drives, and I figured I'd put together a nice Raid 5 fileserver. Is it a better idea to include the OS partition on the Raid, or to put it on its own, dedicated drive? I think almost always its better to go for its own, dedicated drive. I'm a bit paranoid, but in the past I've used two small drives mirrored as my system disk.
|
|
# ? Jul 29, 2008 06:09 |
|
Farmer Crack-rear end posted:I remember hearing a couple of years ago that buying hard drives in bulk could net some pretty good deals. Is that still the case? Where would one go to find that sort of thing? Define bulk? I get more or less the lowest prices around* on disks, near as I can tell, ordering 300-500 spindles/month. Ordering 10-20 will net you a small discount. 20 is a "case" of spindles, normally comes still sealed from the factory. Check out sites like cti-intl.com, though most of the time the hassle isn't worth not just keying it in to newegg/mwave/whatever. Sometimes newegg has some pretty good deals, too, so be on the lookout. While I tend to not be able to take advantage of them due to quantity issues, you can sometimes save another 10%ish off distributor level prices. * Dell, HPAQ, and similar OEM's not included, they're the tier above me, and it's a VERY large jump.
|
# ? Jul 29, 2008 07:42 |
|
The_Last_Boyscout posted:The DNS-343 just arrived on Newegg: One of the reviews I read suggested the raid 5 was software based. Can anyone confirm / deny? Edit : Here's the review, the claim of software based raid is actually in the first comment. http://www.shadowandy.net/2008/07/humble-speed-test-on-the-dns-343.htm I don't see any reference in the dlink documentation to any particular adaptec or promise or whomever raid controller. inignot fucked around with this message at 14:28 on Jul 29, 2008 |
# ? Jul 29, 2008 12:23 |
|
Did d-link fix RAID1 in the DNS-323? Does it actually rebuild properly? Can it even rebuild? Does the UPNP server work with the 360 frontend? This and many more things make up my concerns about dropping $160 into it. I'm considering that + one external usb TB + dual 500GB drives running in a mirroring config for an SMB/FTP/DAAP/UPNP/BT server, but I've already gone through a lot of lovely NAS drives in my time. I'd love to keep my apple HFS+ formatted externals as they are, and I know you can enable r/w support for non-journaled hfs+ in linux (at least ubuntu, no, not with FUSE), but I can't figure out if there are any ipkg or something addons for the onboard firmware to enable this in the DNS-323...
|
# ? Jul 30, 2008 05:59 |
|
vanjalolz posted:I wish there was a way to add a parity drive to an existing 3 drive array in zfs. Would make migration so much easier Extending on this question, what happens if I make a 4 drive raidz array and then take down the parity drive, can I still use the array? Can I write to it? If I readd the drive, will it catch up automatically? If so, what happens if I add a clean drive, can it catch up?
|
# ? Jul 30, 2008 11:52 |
|
ZFS will write GUIDs onto the drives. If you pull it, the array will drop to degraded state and I think still allow writes. If you put the pulled drive back, it'll recognize it via the GUID and update the drive (the versioned metadata tree approach speeds that up, since it can figure out what changed while the drive was offline). If you add a new drive, you need to manually replace the missing drive by it, using the zpool command. The clean drive resilvering will take a while, since the new drive would be clean.
|
# ? Jul 30, 2008 12:03 |
|
Interesting, so following that logic I should be able to start a 3 drive array with 0 parity drives, and add one when I'm ready, right? Also, I remember reading ages ago that SATA is plug and play. I still hear his quite often, but just how plug and play is it? Can I yank the power/data cables on a sata drive while my computer is on or will things break? (assuming the O/S is writing nothing to the drive ofcourse)
|
# ? Jul 30, 2008 13:31 |
|
vanjalolz posted:Interesting, so following that logic I should be able to start a 3 drive array with 0 parity drives, and add one when I'm ready, right? The drive may be, but the filesystem isn't. So long as you've properly unmounted the drive from the OS first, yes, you can just yank the cables hot.
|
# ? Jul 30, 2008 13:59 |
|
So how come PATA drives couldn't be yanked?
|
# ? Jul 30, 2008 15:04 |
|
vanjalolz posted:So how come PATA drives couldn't be yanked? The original ATA spec just didn't support hot-plug ability.
|
# ? Jul 30, 2008 15:15 |
|
My DNS-323 just came in yesterday, and its now holding all my data on a 640GB drive. I also ordered this IDE and SATA drive enclosure today to use a few spare IDE hard drives I have laying around as backups. I haven't had much time to play around with it yet, but so far its great. Copying 110GB of files yesterday took quite some time on 100Mbit, but nothing too shabby (I think I left it copying for 5 hours). While copying, the DNS was reporting temperatures of 34-36C, and is now idling at 32C. The fan is silent and the case feels cool to the touch. Its one hell of a lot quieter than the Dell Optiplex that its replacing! I'll be installing a bitorrent client on it (Transmission) tonight, as well as hooking my Brother HL-2040 printer that was previously on the Optiplex server to the DNS. My only problem is that the DNS reports the drive as being fully formatted at 629GB (which is normal on a 640GB drive), but my Windows XP share says the drive is 585GB. I'm assuming this is a Windows limitation, since the DNS recognizes the true size of the drive. I'll post how the printer runs on it, and how the torrent client is sometime tomorrow (along with pictures!). So far I'm happy with the $137 CAD I paid for it on NCIX. Edit: Fixed the typo! Supersonic fucked around with this message at 01:30 on Jul 31, 2008 |
# ? Jul 30, 2008 21:52 |
|
Supersonic posted:My DNS-343 just came in yesterday, and its now holding all my data on a 640GB drive. So far I'm happy with the $137 CAD I paid for it on NCIX. I don't see them selling this for 137 of any kind of dollars. No one has this for sub 400 dollars. So did you get a different model? Or did you pay more? Just interested for myself.
|
# ? Jul 31, 2008 01:15 |
|
Whoops, I meant to post 323, not 343. I fixed my original post so all should be good now.
|
# ? Jul 31, 2008 01:31 |
|
wykd posted:Did d-link fix RAID1 in the DNS-323? Does it actually rebuild properly? Can it even rebuild? Does the UPNP server work with the 360 frontend? This and many more things make up my concerns about dropping $160 into it. I am under the impression that the USB drive in the 323 is only for printers and doesn't take storage. Is this the case? If it's not I'll likely go get one tomorrow.
|
# ? Jul 31, 2008 06:52 |
|
I have been working on designing a case using an atom motherboard and 2 5 hard drive raid cages as the base for it. The block in the bottom that you don't see is the exhaust fan. Right now I am prototyping this in Google SketchUp. I was interested in getting your guys's opinion: Click here for the full 1143x894 image. Click here for the full 978x1116 image. VVVVVV Edited above to fix due to this comment. Evilkiksass fucked around with this message at 07:26 on Aug 1, 2008 |
# ? Aug 1, 2008 06:11 |
|
Evilkiksass posted:I have been working on designing a case using an atom motherboard and 2 5 hard drive raid cages as the base for it. Right now I am prototyping this in Google SketchUp. I was interested in getting your guys's opinion:
|
# ? Aug 1, 2008 06:26 |
|
DLCinferno posted:Looks like some poor little drives will get mighty toasty stacked together like that.
|
# ? Aug 1, 2008 06:55 |
|
2 pictures are updated. I hope people get a better idea. The hard drives are all in raid cages. Not just sitting one on top of another. The thing labeled as an exhaust fan is linked in my first post.
|
# ? Aug 1, 2008 07:27 |
|
Where's your power supply going to sit?
|
# ? Aug 1, 2008 07:49 |
|
What are you using for the 10 SATA ports?
|
# ? Aug 1, 2008 08:02 |
|
Farmer Crack-rear end posted:Where's your power supply going to sit? Right inside of the 24 pin slot. I will be using a 120 watt pico psu. I know that this is very tight in terms of power but if you consider that all of the drives pulling max power plus the current atom board (which has an inefficient NB) would only put me at 4 watts over (assuming 80% efficiency on the PSU). With disks being spun down after 5-10 minutes of inactivity this should not be an issue I hope. If anyone knows of any tiny fanless PSUs that are more then 120 watts please link me. vanjalolz posted:What are you using for the 10 SATA ports? At the moment I have an areca 1220. I am hoping that by the time I can get all this done the new chipset for the atom will be done and that should be pci-e.
|
# ? Aug 1, 2008 08:20 |
|
vanjalolz posted:Interesting, so following that logic I should be able to start a 3 drive array with 0 parity drives, and add one when I'm ready, right? I'm pretty certain that they use distributed parity, in that each drive has an equal amount of parity on each disk. You cannot do what you are proposing with ZFS.
|
# ? Aug 1, 2008 08:28 |
|
Yeah I have a feeling thats the case, still worth asking. How many (750gig) drives would work efficiently on the old PCI bus? I've got 2 sata ports at the moment, not sure if adding another 2 ports would be worth it.
|
# ? Aug 1, 2008 08:45 |
|
are there any drive cages where I can mount 3.5" drives using 2 5.25" bays or do they all need to use 3 5.25 slots? I'd like to add another 3-4 TB to my drive array, but I don't really want to have to pull the DVD drive.
|
# ? Aug 1, 2008 21:47 |
|
Expiration Date posted:I'd like to add another 3-4 TB to my drive array, but I don't really want to have to pull the DVD drive. There are 2 to 3 raid cages I belive. Go to newegg -> servers -> server accessories, it is in there. vanjalolz posted:How many (750gig) drives would work efficiently on the old PCI bus? I've got 2 sata ports at the moment, not sure if adding another 2 ports would be worth it. I think the 100mbit lan link is going to limit me long before the pci bus does. Regardless this is intended for PCI-E so either Atom will come out on a chipset that has PCI-E or I will move to VIA and their nano when it comes out.
|
# ? Aug 1, 2008 22:07 |
|
Expiration Date posted:are there any drive cages where I can mount 3.5" drives using 2 5.25" bays or do they all need to use 3 5.25 slots? I used these for my new NAS box: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856999211 Speaking of which, the parts came yesterday and I've got it up and running Nexenta with a 2.33TB ZFS pool. Unfortunately the motherboard's onboard NIC doesn't have a solaris driver, so I've gotta wait until Monday to actually start using it. Currently it's running off of a 2GB USB thumbdrive. I've already moved the swap partition to my ZFS pool but I'm wondering if anyone knows how I can move some of the directories that are written to frequently (i.e., /var) to my ZFS pool. Ideally I'd like to make the USB drive read only except in the case of installing new software and such.
|
# ? Aug 1, 2008 22:44 |
|
complex posted:The original ATA spec just didn't support hot-plug ability. That doesn't mean you can't hotplug IDE, I've read about some people doing it. It's just riskier and you need to be more careful. I believe you also need to do a scan in device manager to have it show up. SATA hotplug works pretty much as it should. Couple weeks ago I needed to connect a SATA drive temporarily, so I just disconnected my SATA DVD drive and connected the HDD and it immediately showed up.
|
# ? Aug 2, 2008 17:57 |
|
For those people with huge arrays of SATA hard drives, in the event of a hard drive failure, how do you identify which hard drive is the one that needs to be replaced? Is there a way to set up the system that makes it relatively easy to find?Evilkiksass posted:Right inside of the 24 pin slot. I will be using a 120 watt pico psu. Don't forget to factor in power consumption for that Areca card. Also make sure you stagger the spinup on those drives.
|
# ? Aug 4, 2008 01:28 |
|
Farmer Crack-rear end posted:Don't forget to factor in power consumption for that Areca card. Also make sure you stagger the spinup on those drives. Actually it looks like I will be changing the design to use 2 power supplies. 1 for all the core components, and a second for all the hard drives. Yes it forces the device to use 2 plugs but it will be much better overall. This is still a very early design. Hell the motherboard this is all based on does not exist yet so I got time to adjust things if anyone else sees things that need to be addressed / changed.
|
# ? Aug 4, 2008 02:38 |
|
Why is two small power supplies better than one larger one?
|
# ? Aug 4, 2008 04:36 |
|
Fifty-Nine posted:I used these for my new NAS box: Sup nexenta buddy I installed nexenta this weekend on a 4x750 array raidz1 and its pretty nice. I'm cut that i can only get ~12mb transfer speeds over gigabit ethernet because this motherboard has 2 drives on a pci sata card + gigabit ethernet with no pcie. Must move to atom when I get the chance, this is crazy. As for moving /var, I imagine you'd use the zfs mount command (check man). How can I test the individual drive speeds on my nexenta system? I thought dd if=/dev/dsk/c3t0d0 of=/dev/null count=3GB was clever but it doesn't work.
|
# ? Aug 4, 2008 06:14 |
|
Farmer Crack-rear end posted:Why is two small power supplies better than one larger one?
|
# ? Aug 4, 2008 11:31 |
|
Farmer Crack-rear end posted:Why is two small power supplies better than one larger one? Because I was planning to use 1 of these: http://www.mini-box.com/s.nl/it.A/id.417/.f?sc=8&category=13 Since they are tiny and produce very little heat. Instead I plan to use two of them and then just make a switch to short out the green and black (I think) wires to turn on the second one in order to power up the storage drives. Since they are SATA hotplug should not be an issue. 10 sata drives without staggered spinup should not pull over 80 Watts unless I totally screwed up my math (if I did please correct me, I would rather be wrong during design then implementation).
|
# ? Aug 4, 2008 17:27 |
|
Evilkiksass posted:Because I was planning to use 1 of these: http://www.mini-box.com/s.nl/it.A/id.417/.f?sc=8&category=13 Keep in mind that that's a DC-DC power supply so you'll need two wall AC-DC adapters (which are generally inefficient) both of which can supply 10A at 12V (for 120W) which you may have trouble locating--the best one they have listed on that page only provides 8.5A giving you 102W when operating the adapter at its limit. I don't know if that's acceptable for your design or not, but it's definitely something to consider.
|
# ? Aug 4, 2008 19:06 |
|
Farmer Crack-rear end posted:For those people with huge arrays of SATA hard drives, in the event of a hard drive failure, how do you identify which hard drive is the one that needs to be replaced? Is there a way to set up the system that makes it relatively easy to find? The serial number is readily available via software, so on linux just make a note of the serial for each device, and when for example /dev/sdb goes down look up the serial number in your notes and compare with the label on the drive.
|
# ? Aug 4, 2008 19:56 |
|
|
# ? May 11, 2024 11:06 |
|
Evilkiksass posted:Because I was planning to use 1 of these: http://www.mini-box.com/s.nl/it.A/id.417/.f?sc=8&category=13 Remember that drives pull the most power at spinup, and I'm pretty sure a 3.5" hard drive will pull more than 8 watts at spinup.
|
# ? Aug 5, 2008 17:27 |