[nmglug] RAID, SCSI vs ATA

[Andres Paglayan]

On Jan 21, 2008, at 9:24 AM, Aaron wrote:

> Andres Paglayan wrote:
>> I am kind of tackling the same things at home,
>> new hi-res camera, and lots of stuff to store,
>> and so far I am considering getting whatever mobo supporting several
>> (5 to 8) sata disks,
>> and starting with 3 or 6 500GB raided drives,
>> roughly $450 for 1TB or $750 for 2,5 TB

western digital at sams has a 1tb box for $300
although this should be ok only for home,
or for "remote" (as in I take the HD home) backup,

>
> I have been looking at similar systems for work.
> To save $$, I think it is cheapest to just build
> a box.  Mid or full tower,  mobo with many, many SATA ports.
>
> The biggest storage/$ these days seems to be 500GB SATA drives.
> It is getting rare to have large numbers of IDE (PATA) ports these  
> days.
>
> I have had trouble finding cheap cards with many SATA ports.
> If anybody knows where to find them, let me know.

nope, as you said, it's cheaper to get a mobo with an insane quantity  
of sata ports

>
> When I do see multiple SATA cards, they have RAID in them and
> are more $$ than I was planning on spending for the most of the  
> system!
>
> I have seen some higher-end Mobo's for around $200 that have 6-8  
> SATA ports.

there are some with up to 12,
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131146R

asus @ $214


>
> Then run LINUX SW RAID.  I'm leary of learning *bsd software raid,  
> since
> even the LINUX SW RAID took some time to learn.  My boss will not
> be happy about me billing for that learning curve again.
>
> My take on SW raid is that you need to be a little careful.
> SW RAID5 is a bit risky, IMOHO.
> RAID5 will detect and recover from a disk FAILURE, but will be totally
> unaware of a DISK CORRUPTION event.   RAID6 can catch these.
> So, if you care about reliability, I'd stick to RAID-1 or RAID-6.

not suer, but may be you can turn smart on and run some cron to query  
that will be emailed to you
may be there's already some tool for that,

>
> With disks so relatively cheap these days, RAID1 can make a lot of
> sense.  At least recovery is easy.   RAID6 seems cumbersome,
> unless you are using more than 6 platters or so on your array.
>
> I haven't done RAID1 yet, but for larger arrays, I'd want
> to LVM (or RAID0) together two large block devices,
> then build your RAID1 (Unless RAID1 will allow several devices...
> not just two.  I dunno)
>
> For RAID6, I would just build one giant RAID device, then split it
> up if necessary with something like LVM.
>
>             aaron
>
>
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