building a RAID system - 8 drives

[Alvin Oga]

On Thu, 9 Oct 2003, Jeff Layton wrote:

> > > How do you stick 2TB in a 1 U server?  I've seen 1U cases with four 
> > IDE bays,
> > > and the largest IDE drive I've seen is 250 GB.
> >
> > 8 drives ... 250GB or 300GB each ..
> >
> 
>    Cool. Do you have pictures? How do you get the other 4 drives
> out? I assume they're not accessible from the front so do you
> have to pull the unit out, pop the cover and replace the drive?

yup.. pull the cover off and pop out the drive the hard way vs
"hot swap ide tray"

	autocad generated *.jpg file
	http://linux-1u.net/Dwg/jpg.sm/c2500.jpg

 	( newer version has the mb and ps swapped for better cpu cooling)
	http://linux-1u.net/Dwg/jpg.sm/c2610.jpg ( also holds 8 drives )

> > i/we claim that if the drives fail, something is wrong ... its not
> > necessary for the disks to be removable
> >
> 
>    Are you saying that it's not necessary to have hot-swappable
> drives? (I'm just trying to undertand your point).

if the drive is dying .... 
	- find out which brand/model# it is and avoid it
 	- find out if others are having similar problems
	- put a 40x40x20mm fan on the (7200rpm) disks and see if it helps

i'm not convinced that hotswap ide works w/o special ide controllers
	- pull the ide disk out while its powered up
	- pull the ide disk out while you're writing a 2GB file to it

	- or insert the disk while the rest of the systme is up and
	running

if you have to power down to take the ide disk out, you might as
well do a clean shutdown  and replace the disk the hard way with
a screw driver instead of nice ($50 expensive) drive bay handle
	$ 50 can be an extra 80GB of disk space when a good sale 
	is occuring at the local fries stores	

>    Does everyone remember this:
> 
> http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20030425/index.html
> 
> My only problem with this approach is off-site storage of
> backups. Do you pull a huge number of drives and move them
> off-site? (I still love the idea of using inexpensive drives for
> backup instead of tape though).

i suppose you can do "incremental" backups across the wire ...
and "inode" based backups too ... 

	- it'd be crazy to xfer the entire 1MB file if
	only 1 line changed in it

c ya
alvin

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