a bevy of hard drives -> file server -> solution?

[Al Neri]

My file server - an A64 3000+ with a gig of ram (pretty powerful value machine, a little too powerful for my purposes IMO) has been running great for the past 2-3 years and I am yet to lose a hard drive. The machine is:

10 gig hard drive for the OS (currently XP Pro)
250 gig IDE
250 gig SATA
400 gig SATA
500 gig SATA

Now all that I have is filesharing active on each of the drives and I store my files accordingly, pictures, music, video, etc.

#1

I was wondering if there was a better way to do this, e.g. a NAS enclosure that is fairly cheap that I could hook up (minimum 3) drives, or some other device such as buying enclosures for each of the hard drives and hooking it up to the Linksys NSLU2 Network Storage Link (all I've seen are these with 2 USB outlets).

#2

Is there any way that I (safely) can have all of the drives appear as one huge drive so that I don't have to worry about the constraints on each disk?

#3

Additionally - is there a way that I can have some sort of redundancy or parity with those different size drives - without have identical sized drives? I was considering picking up a 1TB or two drive to throw into the mix (I have about 200 gigs free right now in that whole setup, the 1 gig would give me a total of 1200 gigs free and 2400 gigs or 2200 free and 3400 total. which would give me a ton of free space some of which I'd be able to devote to parity if this were a vyable solution.


I've had this setup one way or another (in a PIII at first then to the A64 after the PIII died (it was old ) without losing a hard drive yet for ~2 yrs.

Thanks in Advance!

Don

 

[JackMDS]

Originally posted by: Don Rodriguez
#2

Is there any way that I (safely) can have all of the drives appear as one huge drive so that I don't have to worry about the constraints on each disk?

Yap that is what Windows Home server does,.
You can installs as many drives as you want.

Mixe internal, external, PATA, SATA, USB, whatever as long as it recognized as a Drive, WHS automatically would consolidated it as one Big Drive call \\WHS\

BTW, it is obvious that your are Not a network person you concentrate on the Hardware the gamer style.

Your Network would benefit much more for a File server with Giga NIC + Giga Switch and Giga NICs on all Network computers.

The file server itself can run 1GHz P-II with 1GB memory and it would work well.

WHS initial installation must be install on a Drive that is at least 80GB.

The installation automatically partitions the first drive to 20GB for the OS and the rest joins all the other drive to be manged as one cohesive drive.

 

[Al Neri]

huh?

 

[tw1164]

upgrade your OS to Windows Home Server, or find a Linux solution (lvm + something for fault tolerance).

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

#1 -- Better is relative, so that completely depends upon your needs, etc.

#2 - You can do this on a RAID controller, and the array type is called JBOD (just a bunch of disks) or simply volume array. It puts all the available hard drives into a single array, but there is no redundancy.

#3 - You can put the drives all in a single RAID 5 array, but it will have the space of 4 250gb hard drives in RAID 5 (750gb available), resulting in a complete loss of the extra 150 and 250gb in the larger drives. You can get a nice RAID controller with a good feature set, and it will be able to make use out of the remaining gb on the disks greater than 250gb. Such a controller will not be cheap though, so that depends upon your budget.

What I would do in that situation is get a simple but decent RAID controller, put the 250's in RAID 1 and store important / critical data on there, and then use the 400gb & 500gb hard drives by themsleves for less important data.

EDIT: The above revolve around hardware solutions, not software RAID.

 

[kevnich2]

Since your not a business and uptime isn't critical, I wouldn't do anything but RAID0 (All drives are put into one single drive letter in windows). RAID is not a backup, it simply provides maximum uptime. For a home user, I wouldn't bother with it as it adds significant cost. I would either do a software RAID0 through Windows (XP won't do this, 2003 or WHS would) or hardware RAID0. Then, get a secondary drive and then run daily/weekly/monthly whatever backups you want. Personally, I have a 1tb array in my server and I back it up bi-weekly to a USB 500gb hard drive. I have two of these so I have two separate backups. Uptime doesn't matter to me but my data is irreplaceable.