On 12/13/05, Jason Bleazard <dml@bleazard.net> wrote:
> Nice, but, ummm... I think your definition of "home" budget is a bit different
> from mine :-). I figure 4 250G drives at $90 each is $360 (less than that
> with the rebate deal Josh found), plus about $40 for a controller card is $400
> for 1T unformatted capacity. Put it all in one of the leftover cases I've
> recycled out of the trash pile, and spend about $50 on an old motherboard, CPU
> and memory on eBay, and I'd be good to go. I might even be able to rescue a
> motherboard out of the trash pile as well, although I'm not sure what the real
> math requirements are for RAID5. I keep reading "oh NOES you can't do RAID on
> anything less than dual 3GHz CPUs!!!" but I'm running a RAID1 on a Duron 850
> that never breaks a sweat. I'm aware that RAID5 is more compute intensive
> than RAID1, but I'm not sure exactly how much more.
Once we've moved into the house and gotten things organized, I'm going
to start thinking seriously about getting a real backup server (maybe
a more robust web server too) set up. I have all my photos for the
last 4+ years on a single IDE drive, as well as my 62GB+ of MP3s on
that same drive. Only a matter of time.
I've been less than impressed with hardware RAID5. At my job in
Syracuse, a number of servers I was somewhat responsible for (not the
hardware or the OS, just the apps running on them) suffered hard drive
failures last spring. Probably 4 drives over 4 months, in 3 servers.
The NT4 box went BSOD as soon as a drive failed - so much for
fault-tolerant. But, we could power cycle, pop in a new drive and let
the array rebuild. The W2K boxes, OTOH, usually ended up with a drive
failure, followed immediately by a backplane controller dying. Result
- replace the controller, then restore from tape. These were all Dell
servers.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Jan 01 2006 - 00:39:43 EST