Saw a trick today, wondering if anybody else had done/tried this? Assume you have a 1U rackmount with 4 front-accessed drive bays, and you want all four bays for a 4-disk RAID5 storage. The idea is to use an internal USB adapter and a couple of bigger USB thumb drives to install to, RAID 1 style, freeing up all your external drive bays. At first, I didn't think that a thumb drive would hold enough for the O/S, but in actual production use for a file server with 14 TB of redundant storage, the OS actually uses less than 6 GB! Here's the internal USB adapter specifically mentioned: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007PODI1W I'd be concerned about getting a higher quality drive than the $10 givaways at Staples; Anybody here ever tried this?
On 2013-11-08, Lists <lists at benjamindsmith.com> wrote:> > The idea is to use an internal USB adapter and a couple of bigger USB > thumb drives to install to, RAID 1 style, freeing up all your external > drive bays. At first, I didn't think that a thumb drive would hold > enough for the O/S, but in actual production use for a file server with > 14 TB of redundant storage, the OS actually uses less than 6 GB!Yeah, thumb drives have really gotten enormous over the years. My concern about the above would be, if one drive fails, you have to down the box, or at least slide the case out and open it, in order to change it. I would be slightly more inclined to do this with external drives. Question: does the controller backing the four hot-swap bays support device carving? You can take one RAID array and expose two volumes to the OS, which appear as separate devices. Both 3ware and MegaRAID cards support this; I imagine Areca does too. One downside is that you can't replace the entire RAID5 on the fly, since it has your OS. --keith -- kkeller at wombat.san-francisco.ca.us
On 11/8/2013 12:57 PM, Lists wrote:> Saw a trick today, wondering if anybody else had done/tried this? Assume > you have a 1U rackmount with 4 front-accessed drive bays, and you want > all four bays for a 4-disk RAID5 storage. > > The idea is to use an internal USB adapter and a couple of bigger USB > thumb drives to install to, RAID 1 style, freeing up all your external > drive bays. At first, I didn't think that a thumb drive would hold > enough for the O/S, but in actual production use for a file server with > 14 TB of redundant storage, the OS actually uses less than 6 GB!USB thumb drives are really not that suitable for anything doing random writes, lots of small files, etc. -- john r pierce 37N 122W somewhere on the middle of the left coast
On Sat, Nov 9, 2013 at 2:27 AM, Lists <lists at benjamindsmith.com> wrote:> Saw a trick today, wondering if anybody else had done/tried this? Assume > you have a 1U rackmount with 4 front-accessed drive bays, and you want > all four bays for a 4-disk RAID5 storage. > > The idea is to use an internal USB adapter and a couple of bigger USB > thumb drives to install to, RAID 1 style, freeing up all your external > drive bays. At first, I didn't think that a thumb drive would hold > enough for the O/S, but in actual production use for a file server with > 14 TB of redundant storage, the OS actually uses less than 6 GB! > > Here's the internal USB adapter specifically mentioned: > http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007PODI1W >Some of the newer workstation/server boards have an internal USB (female) connector soldered on to the board; specifically meant for embedded OS. I have seen it on the Supermicro and Dell systems.> I'd be concerned about getting a higher quality drive than the $10 > givaways at Staples; Anybody here ever tried this?Make sure you do buy industrial quality USB pen drives. I use Apacer but there are others in the market. I prefer to use SATA Disk on Modules (DoM). For basic server install a 2GB DoM is plenty. In either case, do not put swap on the flash drive. -- Arun Khan