[geeks] Recommendations for Home-Use RAID

[Francois Dion]

On 8/10/07, Lionel Peterson <lionel4287 at verizon.net> wrote:
> >From: Francois Dion <francois.dion at gmail.com>
> >Date: 2007/08/10 Fri AM 09:17:04 CDT
> >To: The Geeks List <geeks at sunhelp.org>
> >Subject: Re: [geeks] Recommendations for Home-Use RAID
>
> <snip>
>
> >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.
>
> Wouldn't that cost you all the great improvements in the new SATA driver framework [0] since they are not actual SATA II drives?

Yes, but he wanted to keep his PATA drives. Another option is to use
four IDE drives in IDE mode (onboard controller), and jumpstart the
server so no CDROM is needed. Then add more drives using SATA.

btw, here's one person using onboard SATA here:
http://www.crypticide.com/dropsafe/article/2091

> > 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.
>
> Or you could use a bunch of USB 2.0 drives, like that video I posted a while ago (Sun group in Germany video taped it and put it on the web) [1]

I've done a similar demo at work using a bunch of memorex 128MB usb
keys. As far as USB is concerned, I'm using a USB (masscool drive box
that can take either a SATA or PATA drive) setup w/zfs on my
workstation to back up etc. I offsite with rsync to another USB setup.
It's fast enough to play music, movies etc, although I'm not sure how
many streams could be going on at once.

> >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?
>
> I'd like to try that - that looks good - I wonder how it would work on, say, an Intel MB with their latest SATA controller (ICH8?) - I just built a box with one the other week...

At best, you'd need to run solaris express. Run the java compatibility
tool and see what happens.

Francois