[Nottingham] Big biiig problem regarding IDE-RAID

[Robert Davies]

On Tuesday 15 Jul 2003 14:24, Graeme Fowler wrote:
> On Tue, 15 Jul 2003, Rob Andrews wrote:

> This is in an effort to stop using stupidly expensive (read: 3000 quid
> plus) systems where sub-1000 quid systems will do. Without giving too much
> away to the LUG as a whole, with disk sizes growing and prices falling,
> large capacity IDE drives have just become a far more attractive
> proposition.

There's some nice-ish IDE RAID enclosures with SCSI interfaces, with serial 
ATA coming hot swap IDE is going to be made simpler, so costs should fall yet 
more.  I would be very tempted to look into using 2 IDE enclosures with 
striped disks run off seperate SCSI cards.  That way you have complete I/O 
redundancy, can use simple software mirroring, and let the IDE enclosure 
worry about the striping, rather than access the area as a JBOD.

What you're thinking of is very very doable with software RAID.  I looked into 
it a few years back, though at time the 240GB plus capacity the project  
required wasn't feasible.  Working it out with quality components a RAID 
Network File server using ECC DDRAM ... something similar to system I've 
recently put together  :

MSI K7D Master LAN                                 £116
Crucial PC2100 DDR ECC Reg 512MB  £  61
AMD Athlon MP2000+                               £  76  (allows SMP upg.)
Decent Cooler                                             £  12
Basic AGP card                                           £  25
IDE ATA-100 Controller (no frills)              £   30
Case + P/S                                                   £100
Round ATA-133 cables 4 @ 2.75              £  11
IDE Disks 7,200 80GB  4 @  68                 £272
D-Link 4 port NIC                                          £145

Total  ex VAT                                                £848

Not bad for 160 GB capacity RAID-10 storage and 5 ethernet ports  :)
Of course if ECC not necessary, then you can save another £75 or so, using an 
Nforce2 with onboard graphics, possibly another £100 using std single port 
NICs and filling more PCI slots.

What you loose though is hot swap and other high availability features, but 2 
of those still comes out a lot cheaper than the trad hardware based 
solutions.

Rob