Overall Needs Ranked in Order of Importance (Further Items Might Not Happen Any Time Soon):
1) Storage Solution:
- ~1 to 1.5 TB of redundant hard drive storage
- Relatively cheap beyond the costs of the hard drives themselves
- Expandable
- Quiet
- Easy managment (Preferably would appear as a single volume)
- Low Power
- Directly accessible from Windows (Samba share would probably work though I would prefer it to be directly connected)
3) Another machine to mount another BenQ 1655 so that as I am burning DVDs I can be doing PI/PO scans using Nero CDSpeed in parallel
4) Improved interfaces:
- USB 2.0 - Neither of my computers has USB 2.0 I would like to get an IPod Nano soon so USB 2.0 connections would be useful.
- Sata II - I would prefer not to buy anymore IDE drives as they are a dying technology and the cabling restricts airflow so much.
6) New machine all to run my numerically and disk intensive simulations at home (FEA).
I have the following hardware currently available:
Desktop (Windows XP SP2) (This is the main machine that I use at home day to day):
AMD Athlon 1.33 GHz (CNPS7000B-AlCU CPU Cooler)
512 MB DDR 266 RAM
IWill KA266+ (USB ports do not function I think because I accidently cut some traces on the MB) (2 PCI slots left)
ANTEC SLK3000B Case (Yate Loon 120 mm fan mounted to cool 5 hard drives)
ANTEC Truepower 2.0 430 W PSU
Matrox Millenium G550
3Com Etherlink XL 10/100 PCI Ethernet Card
Promise Ultra100 Tx2 IDE Controller Card
Promise Ultra133 Tx2 IDE Controller Card
BenQ 1655 DVD Burner
NEC 3540 DVD Burner
Kingwin Mobile Rack
CoolerMaster 4 in 3 Hard Drive Mount (This is mounted in the top three 5.25 bays)
Laptop (Windows XP SP2):
Dell 4100 (600 Mz P3)
40 GB Samsung Laptop Hard Drive
Network Router:
Linksys WRT54G v4
I am leaning to some sort of RAID6 solution because of problems RAID5 has with rebuilds and uncorrectable read errors. I relize that RAID is not a backup but I have not seen a viable backup solution for ~1 TB at a cost I am willing to pay. As far as I can tell only recent PCIe or PCI-X hardware raid controllers support RAID 6 expansion. Except for the problems with growing the array the md linux solution looks to be the most cost effective unfortunately I would like something that I can expand to account for future storage needs.
A) Are there any other solutions that I should consider or gotchas that I haven't listed below.
B) Which way would you go and why?
C) If I go the Linux route and pick up an older motherboard and processor what would you recommend? What current heatsinks and fans would work with it? Is there a specific used components that I could ebay that would be relatively quiet?
Ideas that I am considering for storage solutions:
Solaris x86 using ZFS
Pros:
- ZFS management sees relatively easy and well documented
- Checksumming would help data corruption problems
- RAIDz2 is essentially equivalent to RAID 6
- Limited hardware compatibility (It is possible I would need a new MB, CPU, and RAM)
- Without a 64 Bit CPU the amount of memory that ZFS can use is limited to 512 MB and apparently has some impact on performance.
- It is not clear if Samba works correctly? (It seems to be built in but there are problems with ACLs)
- It is not currently possible to add devices to a raidz vdev. I couldn't expand the vdev by adding the same size disks.
- Solaris seems to be lacking a good package managment system. Nexata looks interesting but it is still in beta and doesn't update the core OS.
- I am not familiar with Solaris administration and updating.
Linux Software RAID5/6 on an Old Machine
I could pick up a cheap P3 motherboard, CPU, RAM, Case, and PSU, and some PCI sata cards and make a linux software raid with md and maybe EVMS.
Pros:
- Potenially cheap hardware except for sata cards, case, and psu.
- RAID 6 arrays cannot be grown currently
- I have not used Linux/Unix in a serious way for at least 8 years
- No vendor support for RAID solutions
- I have enough old hardware already
- Unclear what type of bit scrubbing md does to avoid uncorrectable read errors
Pros:
- Easy setup and administration
- X-RAID allows expansion as I can afford disks
- Low power
- Limited to 4 disks (I wish this had 8 bays)
- Cost (~$650 for the device without disks)
- Less flexible than a general linux installation
- RAID 6 is not available
- Unclear what type of bit scrubbing the device does to avoid uncorrectable read errors
Two recent hardware RAID cards support RAID 6:
Areca ARC-1220 PCI-Express x8 Sata II Controller Card - $494.00
3ware 9590SE-8ML PCI Express x4 SATA II - $504.00
Pros:
- I could keep my storage directly accessible in a Windows machine
- Easy administration
- Hardware compatibility lists for motherboards and hard drives
- Battery backups add at least another $100 dollars
- Cost and I would need to purchase a new MB, CPU, and RAM.
- The hardware controller becomes a single point of failure.
- Not as easily sharable to other computers in the future.
Pros:
- Relatively inexpensive
- Potenially directly attached to my current machine
- Loss of half my storage space to mirror drives.
- PCI bus in my current machine is already fairly crowded.
B) Which way would you go and why?
C) If I go the Linux route and pick up an older motherboard and processor what would you recommend? What current heatsinks and fans would work with it? Is there a specific used components that I could ebay that would be relatively quiet?