[Sussex] Storage WAS: AMD Sempron Chips and BIG backups

[Jon Fautley]

Ronan Chilvers wrote:
> On Wed, 14 Dec 2005 09:24:29 +0000
> Jon Fautley <jfautley at redhat.com> wrote:
> 
> 
>>Alan Pope wrote:
>>
>>>Heheh@ big drives. One mans "big" is another mans "tiny".
>>
>>Agreed - 100GB? Pah... ;)
>>
>>A quick tally of storage that I really should backup stands at ~1TB. 
>>That's just at home - I'm not even going to mention work ;)
> 
> 
> What!?  1TB?  At home?  Have you bought HMVs entire stock and converted
> it all to MP3 format or something?  How the heck have you stumped up a
> terabyte at home?
> 
> You win the big data award, btw!  :-)

Sadly not - Mark Harrison does :(

Mark: I'm guessing if Bassfiend was here, he'd probably win - he must be 
into the ExaBytes now? ;)

I have around 30GB of MP3s. The rest is random software, video, and a 
*lot* of wasted space ;)

> 
>>in one enclosure. That's also why you can get "SATA RAID" disks -
>>they're designed for bulk use.
> 
> 
> I can't find a reference to SATA raid drives anywhere... I've tended
> towards seagate and can't find anything on their site about sata raid
> drives??? Got any urls that I can look at?

Check ebuyer. They generally have 2 editions of a specific disk - the 
standard one, and a "RAID Edition". They're not very well labeled though :(

> 
>>Just remember - sticking a large number of cheap disks in a single 
>>enclosure can cause problems - if this is a mission critical system,
>>I would consider SCSI disks, or if price is an issue, SATA RAID disks.
> 
> 
> Basically this project is one that is sorely needed but may not get
> past the requisition stage if its too pricey.  Not directly linked to
> sales success, ergo, not important...  Hence I was looking at SATA
> rather than SCSI, but maybe I'm fooling myself a bit.  Possibly
> investing in a decent enclosure and some good drives will save me
> headaches down the road...

Just remember that compromising on quality now can cause problems later ;)

You get what you pay for :)

> On the other hand maybe getting a decent drive enclosure will be enough
> to reliably house a set of SATA drives?
> 
> 
>>>This can be done under linux with LVM I believe. I have not tried it
>>>myself but this link might be interesting to you.
>>>
>>>http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/snapshotintro.html
>>
>>Ack. If you're going down this road, test, test, test and test some
>>more before you deploy it :)
> 
> 
> Why's that then?  Having a full drive backup is quite an attractive idea
> I think.  Or are you acking the LVM snapshot stuff?

The 'Ack' was an "I'd not use it in production" sort of 'scream' ;)

I have it from a very good source that there can be problems with 
snapshots in certain environments. Just ensure you test all scenarios 
thoroughly, and you should be OK :)

Jon
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