HI All, I have a dilemma and I would appreciate advice 1. Get a good size case, mobo, processor, etc and put 8 hard drives it in and RAID them. (yes an 8 port SATA mobo). Running CentOS. or 2. Get an eSATA enclosure that has room for 8 or 10 drives and just connect it to box? I know that RAID is not a full proof backup, but I am looking for a solution to store all of my data, projects, music, etc, etc Can I get thoughts for ideas for solutions? Thank You -Jason
Slack-Moehrle wrote:> HI All, > > I have a dilemma and I would appreciate advice > > 1. Get a good size case, mobo, processor, etc and put 8 hard drives it in and RAID them. (yes an 8 port SATA mobo). Running CentOS. > > or > > 2. Get an eSATA enclosure that has room for 8 or 10 drives and just connect it to box? >esata enclosure will be on a single SATA port, which will be a bottleneck for 4 or more drives. maybe even for 3 drives. 8 or more drives should be on a 4 channel SAS port at least. how about getting something like a QNAP and putting your storage on the network? for instance, http://www.qnap.com/pro_detail_feature.asp?p_id=134
Hi John, Yes, I looked into this and I was looking for a solution with a large number of drives, but at a good cost point. So you are saying a full fledged PC with an 8-port sata mobo is a better solution. --Jason ----- Original Message ----- From: "John R Pierce" <pierce at hogranch.com> To: "CentOS mailing list" <centos at centos.org> Sent: Saturday, February 20, 2010 9:36:59 PM Subject: Re: [CentOS] eSATA drive enclosure of a full PC? Slack-Moehrle wrote:> HI All, > > I have a dilemma and I would appreciate advice > > 1. Get a good size case, mobo, processor, etc and put 8 hard drives it in and RAID them. (yes an 8 port SATA mobo). Running CentOS. > > or > > 2. Get an eSATA enclosure that has room for 8 or 10 drives and just connect it to box? >esata enclosure will be on a single SATA port, which will be a bottleneck for 4 or more drives. maybe even for 3 drives. 8 or more drives should be on a 4 channel SAS port at least. how about getting something like a QNAP and putting your storage on the network? for instance, http://www.qnap.com/pro_detail_feature.asp?p_id=134 _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS at centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 7:17 AM, Slack-Moehrle <mailinglists at mailnewsrss.com> wrote:> HI All, > > I have a dilemma and I would appreciate advice > > 1. Get a good size case, mobo, processor, etc and put 8 hard drives it in > and RAID them. (yes an 8 port SATA mobo). Running CentOS. > > or > > 2. Get an eSATA enclosure that has room for 8 or 10 drives and just connect > it to box? > > I know that RAID is not a full proof backup, but I am looking for a > solution to store all of my data, projects, music, etc, etc > > Can I get thoughts for ideas for solutions? > > Thank You > -Jason > _______________________________________________ > >If you're building something on the cheap, then you could get an even cheaper setup with a 4port SATA motherboad, and an add 4port SATA PCI / PCI-e card. Some of those eSATA enclosures will use 1x SATA port per HDD, and some even work on USB which is even worse. If you can run each HDD on it's own port, you'll get optimal performance. For a cheap in-office storage, I use these: http://www.google.com/products/catalog?hl=en&safe=off&q=icy+dock&cid=7046738176421693906&sa=title#p It's basically a hot-swap cage, but I need to manually tell the OS that the drive was removed, since it doesn't run on a server back-plane. But it does the job as far as cheap storage goes :) Put 4x 2TB HDD's in there and you have 4TB storage on RAID10 -- Kind Regards Rudi Ahlers SoftDux Website: http://www.SoftDux.com Technical Blog: http://Blog.SoftDux.com Office: 087 805 9573 Cell: 082 554 7532 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/attachments/20100221/281a5830/attachment.html>
Hi Rudi,>>If you're building something on the cheap, then you could get an even cheaper setup with a 4port SATA >>motherboad, and an add 4port SATA PCI / PCI-e card.True, that would be each drive on its own port, which is optimal. With 8 ports, I could get 8 x 2tb and and have 8th in RAID10. What about this: http://www.google.com/products/catalog?q=8+x+sata&cid=13835643122069874118&sa=title#p And just a normal PC with lots of drives? -Jason Some of those eSATA enclosures will use 1x SATA port per HDD, and some even work on USB which is even worse. If you can run each HDD on it's own port, you'll get optimal performance. For a cheap in-office storage, I use these: http://www.google.com/products/catalog?hl=en&safe=off&q=icy+dock&cid=7046738176421693906&sa=title#p It's basically a hot-swap cage, but I need to manually tell the OS that the drive was removed, since it doesn't run on a server back-plane. But it does the job as far as cheap storage goes :) Put 4x 2TB HDD's in there and you have 4TB storage on RAID10 -- Kind Regards Rudi Ahlers SoftDux Website: http://www.SoftDux.com Technical Blog: http://Blog.SoftDux.com Office: 087 805 9573 Cell: 082 554 7532 _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS at centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
Slack-Moehrle wrote:>> a bunch of vendors sell 5-in-3 sata hotswap adapters that hold 5 SATA >> drives in 3 HH external bays of a jumbo tower chassis. they seem to run >> about $100. each drive bay has its own sata port on the back of these. >> >> example of one of these, >> http://www.amazon.com/SUPERMICRO-Hot-Swap-Mobile-System-Cabinet/dp/B00009ILU0 >> > > So I am confused, where does this go? It is external? Or does it fit inside a full tower case? >it fits in the HH 5.25" external bays of a big tower, where you might put CDs or tape drives. it takes 3 HH 5.25" bays and holds 5 3.5" drives. use a big tower that has 7 HH bays, and you can have a DVD and 2 of those 5 drive bays.
> 1. Get a good size case, mobo, processor, etc and put 8 hard drives it in and RAID them. (yes an 8 port SATA mobo). Running CentOS. > > or > > 2. Get an eSATA enclosure that has room for 8 or 10 drives and just connect it to box?My recommendation is the 2nd option. I ran the first for a couple of years and was always suffering disk failures because you really really need good air-flow to keep that many disks cool. I recently got a Sans Digital TowerRAID TR8M-B - 8 Bay SATA to eSATA; this shows up as two buses on the PC (which CentOS sees nicely) with 4 devices on each bus and I can run RAID5 and LVM on the disks as normal. (partial output of lsscsi) [6:0:0:0] disk ATA ST31000340AS SD15 /dev/sdc [6:1:0:0] disk ATA ST31000340AS SD15 /dev/sdd [6:2:0:0] disk ATA ST31000340AS SD15 /dev/sde [6:3:0:0] disk ATA ST31000340AS AD14 /dev/sdf [7:0:0:0] disk ATA ST31000340AS AD14 /dev/sdg These are the 5 disks I have in the TowerRAID -- rgds Stephen