Hi guys, My newest project is to make a small, in size, but large in disk space and power computer. I am thinking shuttle sized, or 1 foot cubed, with good specs, but whatever. One thing I want, is atleast a terabyte of hard drive space. I've read all about massive storage computers, and well, I really don't know where to begin. - - If money was unlimited, what would be the best way to get the TB? - - If money is limited, what would be the cheapest and easiest way? I've been looking on eBay at 1Us, they go for around $4,000 USD.. they have atleast 1 TB, most have 2.4 TB, but, I could always take the innerds out of those and put it into a new box, but you are paying alot for the server itself, like multi-psu for 99.9% uptime and stuff like that I don't need. So, EIDE? IDE? SCSI? I'm not sure.. so if you know, please help me out. Thanks, emu
The best way to get SMALL storage if money was no object might be to buy 2.5" laptop drives... but i don't know how big they come; you could just buy 4*250GB standard IDE drives; that'd get you 1TB of space (or near enough). SCSI is best for high-speed transfer and backup i think, if you just want actual storage space then IDE is best and cheapest...
No matter what route you go, multiplule interface cards are teh way to go. I've seen SCSI raid 5 arrays slow to a crawl after so many disks are put on the chain because the contoller simply isn't fast enough. IDE seems to force this issue directly though As for notebook drives, Fulitsu's largest drives seem to be 80 gig, as is IBM's as well as Toshiba's. Seagate only has up to a 40 gig option. These are all the makers of notebook drives I can think off, but it looks like 80 gig is the max here.
Dont bother with notebook drives, the capacity for a Terra-farm isnt there yet. Maxtor do 250 and 300gig disks. Which means a 4 channel IDE controller and 4 disks will give you 1-1.2Tb of space and each will have its own channel. If its just storage, they dont need to be fast, just get another 40/60gig small, cheap 7200rpm drive for OS/programs and you're sorted. As for "powerful" depends what you want todo with it. If its just movie/media storage and playback then the new EPIA 1ghz mini itx is tiny and has a PCI slot for that 4 port IDE card too. Otherwise you could get a P4 mini itx version or go for flex atx or micro atx or try and buy a shuttle board with AGP if u need it. 4 disks on their side doesnt take that much space, and they are probably abou the height of the PCI card too. A full size PCI card wont fit in a 1U case though.
If you want to go the 1U route then you're probably looking at a very expensive server board inside there without the space to put all the hard disks. Personally I think some kind of home-made case would be best.
I think the max height is either 41 or 51mm, I can't remember. If it is 51mm internal then you could fit two drives stacked which would give enough room for about 4 drives in there with no optical drive and a small motherboard. Then the only problem is heat since there will be minimal if any airflow over the drives. It would be good though
Hey guys, Thanks alot for the help so far.. I only said the 1U, because I couldn't find anything that could do the 4 drive thing without doing the massive-ness of scsi and get the price into the $10ks. So, I thought I would have to do rip the guts of the server. And small.. well, shuttle is fine, but I know having 4 very large drives is going to get kinda hot. So, 1 foot cubed. I think that should be enough for a micro board from asus, and all the other junk. May need more room. Anywho, Thanks so far, I'm researching into the 4x250/300. emu
Back again, Just checked adaptec's site.. thank's to y'all I knew what I was looking for. Now, they have two cards with the 4 ports. ATA RAID and Serial ATA RAID.. ATA Raid transfer speed is 100mb/s, SATA is 1.5gig/s. So.. with that said, the cards are the same price. $390USD. Okay, so.. now for the SATA card, it says the system requirements: Available 5 volt or 3.3 volt, PCI 2.2complaint PCI slot Is that a standard? All I know is that my graphics card goes in the AGP slot, and that's pretty much it. LOL. --------- Now. I checked out Westy Digiy's site, and they have a new 250gig SATA drive with the 1.5g transfer speed. Says operating temp is 5c to 55c, that's hot. So now I've gotta think about heat more. --------- Another thing, what raid would be the terabyte? Because I know there is like 0/1/2/3/5 or something. I read a FAQ, but nothing I've seen explains my question. Thanks again! emu
Ur in the US so i cant help, otherwise i could have pointed you to places that do the maxtor 250/300gig disks. Try places like bestbuy and newegg they seem to be common US stockists. What do u want todo with this space again?? A shuttle system wont accomodate 4 drives, only 2 tops. You could always attempt to mod ur own box. Try radioshack or somethin similar. The 4 port IDE cards i was on about are Promise ones, and should be cheaper than adaptec. Although, if you are tight for space id defo look at SATA disks otherwise you're gonna have a cable nightmare. ATA is 100Mbit and SATA is 150Mbit per second MAXIMUM, however, at the current state of disk technology youll not get near either and if its just for storage then youll not need speed. The PCI card is standard PCI card. Remember the PCI bus is only 133Mbit and you share it with audio/lan etc so youll not get full SATA or ATA speed anyway. The western digi SATA 250gig ones are louder then the Maxtor ones cause western digi dont yet use fluid bearings to the best of my knowledge, but its SATA so probably better for you. To be honest you dont want to raid them. Just leave them as separate disks. If you need some sort of RAID funtionality go for "JBOD" where it conglomerates the whole disk array into one big mofo disk. There's little point in RAID since youll be running off a normal PCI bus. Dont worry about temps - anything over 55C is usually bad for the system as a whole, so find out what you want first, then look for a case to suit it and the size u need it for.
The only RAID levels you might want to use for storage like this are 1, 3 or 5. 1 - Mirrored drives, which means you'd lose half your storage space for backup purposes 3 - One drive is used to store parity of the data on the others, so you lose one drives worth of space 5 - Like RAID-3 but the parity is spread across the drives, again you lose about a drives worth of space Basically it depends how vital this data is. If it would destroy your life if you lost it I'd personally say something like RAID-5 might be worth the extra cash, but otherwise it's a waste of disk space.
www.newegg.com any day for hardware sata raid cards, ata133 raid cards, hard drives, graphics cards, motherboards, processors anything you can ever imagine and they have the best prices i have seen anywhere on the internet would suggest to go for sata drives as in a small case like that it can get very crowded very quickly with big daft cables, especially for 4 drives no i dont work for newegg
