Best alternative for OS drive

[Red Squirrel]

I have 8 sata bays in my server and no room for more drives (not enough ports). I've been toying with the idea of putting the OS on a different medium just so I can have 8 drives for data. Right now I have one drive for OS and 3 for data (MD raid 5). Eventually I'd like to just make two big raid 10 volumes, or maybe a big raid 5.

I am wondering if putting Linux on a USB stick or a USB flash card reader would be viable, or would it be too slow? I also know flash card memory is limited in writes, so would the swap file pretty much kill it in a matter of months? The nice thing about this is flash cards are rather cheap, so I could occasionally DD the entire card to another card and have a very quick image of my OS for the even it does fail. Suppose I would not be able to do this "live" though. Just wondering if I may be overlooking something. In fact I'm even thinking about going with a USB drive. Could even go a step further and use a NAS cage so I actually have redundancy for the OS drive.

I don't really care about super duper performance and super fast bootup times, this is a home server. As long as I do not degrade performance to a point where it will slow down the whole system once it's up and running. A longer bootup time is no biggie.

 

[MalVeauX]

Heya,

Sure, you could run it on a USB stick.

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/

The only thing is, if you use RAID and stuff, it better be hardware based since your OS is essentially floating. And as you mentioned, having more than one stick so you can quickly replace it in case it fails is a good idea. USB sticks are dirt cheap. You don't need more than 1GB either, so, really, you should have no issue with this. I wouldn't bother with a USB drive for the OS. If anything, I'd use USB/eSATA as a means to add more drives to your server.

I'm confused on a few things though. Are you limited by the number of SATA ports available to you? Or is your case limited in how many more HDD's you can put in it? I ask because you can get HDD controller cards (4 port SATA) for cheap to add way more ports to your server to allow for a lot more HDD's. If you're limited by your case, well, you can get a rackmount server case with 20 HDD hot swap bays for example. I would do this before doing something like "OS on a USB" to get a single drive free'd up.

Another thing you can look into is an external HDD cage with 4 to 8 HDD's for example, that connect via port multiplier -> eSATA -> your server.

So what's actually the deal? SATA limited or Case limited?

If you're only limited by SATA ports on your board, here's some options:

Add 4 HDD's via 4 Port SATA2 HDD controller: $40 via PCI or $60 via PCIe 1.0
-- If you try to get a single 8 port controller, it's like $250+. I would just get several 4 ports. Or, get a SAS controller (Dell PERCi/5 on Ebay for like $85~120 and some SAS to SATA cables), it's PCIe.

If you're case limited by places to put HDD's, check out a server case:

Up to 14x HDD's in thise Ark F4 Rackmount: $73.

Combine the two if you need both.

Very best,

 

[Red Squirrel]

I'm limited by the number of ports. The IDE header on this mobo does not work and I was sick of RMAing like half my order when I built this server so I just gave up and never bothered to RMA it, so I was stuck using a sata port for the cdrom drive (has 5 ports) so that gives 4 for drives, then I had to use 2 sata cards (could not find card with more then 2 ports) for 4 more ports. All expansion slots are filled (two PCIe). So if there's a way to add more ports through USB that would work too, I realize it would not be as fast but I'd only use for OS.

I have 3 bays extra so technically if I wanted to I could add a cage with 4 more drives but no where to plug them.

I prefer to stick to MD raid as it's cheaper and I actually find it performs quite well and it's universal, no special drivers or anything to worry about. I could plot the drives in a different server and assemble the raid and still see all my data.

 

[Gillbot]

get an external sata port multiplier, just search newegg for "SATA Port Multiplier" and you'll see some options.

Also, there are many SATA cards out there that have more than 2 ports.

 

[MalVeauX]

Heya,

Gotcha. Welp, I just linked some 4 port PCIe controllers. Two of those would give you 8 ports, which doubles the number of ports you have just by replacing those old SATA controllers you're using. That makes room for 4 new drives right away. Pretty simple solution right there.

Or, do the port multiplier approach. It's not as cheap though.

Very best, 🙂

 

[Red Squirrel]

Heya,

Gotcha. Welp, I just linked some 4 port PCIe controllers. Two of those would give you 8 ports, which doubles the number of ports you have just by replacing those old SATA controllers you're using. That makes room for 4 new drives right away. Pretty simple solution right there.

Or, do the port multiplier approach. It's not as cheap though.

Very best, 🙂

Hmm port multipliers sound interesting, think I'll look into that, even if I can get an internal one for just the CDROM and an OS hard drive, that might be the cheapest route.