[Nottingham] multi-terabyte raid arrays

[Jim Moore]

I've built RAID stacks using VIA Epia motherboards (those tiny boards) 
and a RAID card of some description or other plugged into the single PCI 
slot. Biggest one I built was for a client at 3TB, using 4x750GB SATA 
drives, a 200GB IDE for system and a 4-port SATA RAID controller. Was 
pretty darn rapid, unfortunately it only had a 100MBit network interface 
so it was always waiting for that and never actually got to run full 
tilt... I have one Epia board left and that's going to be utilised as a 
home 1TB (4x250GB) stack in a Shuttle X box (some metal cutting involved 
there). As for purpose-built NAS boxen, only a Lacie 400GB job and that 
thing fell victim to some sort of firmware bug within days of plugging 
it in. Random files and folders filled the drive and rendered the 
network interface the wrong side of useless. As far as I know, and from 
experience with that box, NAS appliances have to be formatted to FAT32 
(either preformatted or in the case of RAID appliances, via the web 
interface); formatting them to ext/x or any other exotic filesystem and 
getting the firmware to recognise it is difficult at best. Best bet if 
you want to use other filesystems on a NAS appliance is to build your own.

Cheers,

TLP

James Gibbon wrote:
> Anyone got any experience with these?
>
> http://www.lacie.com/uk/products/product.htm?pid=10950
>
> It's a "LACIE BIGGEST QUADRA" 4TB RAID drive, advertised as
> compatible with Macs and Windows - but I'm hoping that it
> should work OK with Linux (I'd use the Firewire connection).
> It's described as "plug & play and driver-free" so I'm
> assuming I can set it up as RAID5 then put ext3 or reiserfs
> on it, but feel free to correct me if you know better, as it
> would be an expensive mistake :D
>
> Anyone using a similar product with Linux? I'm particularly
> looking for something I can directly attach rather than the
> ubiquitous network storage appliance.
>
> Cheers
> James
>
>
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