[plug] New Linux Raid-6 Box

[Brad Campbell]

Timothy White wrote:
> Brad Campbell wrote:
> 
>> Ok, finally got around to snapping some pics of my new Raid-6 box.
>>
>> It's not the fastest on the planet, but fairly roomy :)
>>
> Just curious. Why? How Much? And Where can I get one?

Why? Because I'm stuck in an oppressive country and need something to do in my spare time.

How Much? This box cost about 15K AED all up. At current exchange rates is about 5K AUD.

Where can you get one? I built it myself. Hardest was finding a midi-tower case that had 9 bays 
exposed. This one was a duplicator case that happened to have an ATX rear end, but no motherboard 
tray. I had to add some appropriate standoffs to bolt the board to the other side of the case. The 
PSU needed some internal re-wiring to export the extra 12v-15A rail in the right place.

It is Raid-6, 3TB ext3 filesystem exported over NFS using Gig-E.

It's sister is my main server, it has a slightly smaller filesystem.

bklaptop:~>ssh srv df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1              19G  9.0G  8.5G  52% /
tmpfs                 760M     0  760M   0% /dev/shm
/dev/hda3             165G  138G   19G  88% /raid0
/dev/md2              459G  446G   14G  98% /raid2
/dev/md0              2.1T  2.1T   16G 100% /raid
storage1:/server      3.0T  304G  2.7T  11% /raid3

It's a home entertainment system. The front end is a diskless Athlon with a Matrox G400 dual head 
connected to an XGA DLP projector and SPDIF to the surround sound system for AC3 and DTS passthrough.
The servers live in another room and the front end has a dead quiet PSU with 120mm fan and super 
slow/efficient cpu cooler. The whole lot is driven by a Streamzap IR remote control.

To bring DVD's into this country entails losing them for an indeterminate period of time while 
customs check for "inappropriate material" and possibly not getting all of them back, so all my 
DVD's are safely stored in Carslile and the contents brought up on hard disk.

Plus, I enjoy torturing the raid subsystem and libata drivers.

There are 14 drives in the main server and 15 drives in the storage box. The main server is the only 
one with an OS hard disk. The front end boots off USB keystick into an nfs root, and the storage box 
boots off PXE into an nfs root.

All drives are polled every 20 minutes with smartd and arrays are monitored with mdadm. 
Failures/warnings are E-mailed to me.

Have had 2 drive failures thus far. All RAID disks are Maxtor Maxline-II 250GB SATA drives. I have 
one dead at about 5000 hours, and another DOA. Both RMA'd and swapped on the spot.

Regards,
Brad
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