[geeks] Recommendations for Home-Use RAID

[Francois Dion]

On 8/9/07, J. Alexander Jacocks <jjacocks at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have a Yellow Machine RAID (http://yellowmachine.com, though the company's
> out of business) that I store all my archived data on.  Right now, it has 4
> 500gb PATA disks in it, and is running RAID-5.
[...]
>
> So, I'm looking for suggestions for a replacement device, or setup.  If
> possible, I'd prefer to re-use the PATA disks that I have (I have a ton of
> 250gb and 500gb disks)

Get a PC, get a pair of SATA controllers (man marvell88sx to find what
cards work at top performance w/solaris, that's the chipset found in
thumper), and since you want to use PATA drives get SATA/PATA
adapters. I get them at a local store for about $7, I'm sure you can
do better online. Install Solaris 10 U4 (out officially in two weeks
or so). man zfs. depending on how you want to do this, and how many
drives total, you could go raid-z w/hot spare, or raid mirror+stripe.
It is one command line with zpool. Then create whatever zfs
filesystem(s) on top of the pool. You can auto share with samba
through the zfs command when you create the filesystem or later. You
can of course add nfs if you need it. You now have your own homebrew
Thumper.

The advantage is that your data wont get silently corrupted like they
can with Raid-5 or anything else out there (been there, done that,
lost a lot of digital copies of my vinyl records that took forever to
convert - the files looked ok, the os, backup program etc never saw it
coming, silent corruption all the way to my backup).

> and I'd like to significantly improve my write
> performance.

zfs w/ fast controllers and enough ram is pretty darn good. What kind
of throughput do you need? Sustained? What kind of data? Video?

Francois