Let’s say I have a need for massive data storage - 10+ 400Gb drives, for example.
At any given time, only one drive would be accessed. What would be the best way to do this?
Are there any requirements for redundancy or backup? If there’s no failover requirement, then a JBOD array would be the simplest solution. Many RAID controllers support JBOD. Otherwise, I would reccomend a RAID 5 setup. You get automatic parity data distributed across every disk, so you can lose one at a time without losing data.
If you have the connectors for them on your motherboard (and an add-in drive controller card or two) you can just plug them in one by one and let your operating system discover them and give them individual drive letters.
If you want one big drive under a single letter, there’s a function in RAID called “JBOD” or Just a Bunch Of Drives that lets you lump together an arbitrary number of drives.
Probably your largest difficulty will be mechanical - mounting all those drives and having places to plug them all into. Four and five port IDE or SATA cards are readily available in the $250-300 price range. The IDE controllers run two drives per IDE cable, but SATA is a one-cable-one-drive hookup. In this use, IDE would work out easier.
For this proposed four terabytes, do you have any plans on how to back up al that data?
Backup would not be a major issue. Also, the data on the individual drives would not be altered once they are in place.
Would you be able to add drives as needed?
Construction-wise, I have seen mini-towers made for holding multiple drives. Would these work?
Wouldn’t a server be a better solution?
I didn’t think of that. What are the FAQs? I am woefully out of touch with computer hardware these days.
Cheap simple non commercial server wise, how about a bunch of USB externals, easy to add or subtract and self configuring.
How rapidly do you need to access this data? This sounds like a stack of CDs or DVD-Rs and possibly even a “jukebox” to automate changing them could be a viable option and you’d not need to worry about the data being lost in a drive failure.
Would you be to configure 10 or more?
This is pretty much the idea.
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- If you only want to use them separately as regular drives, then you just need to get controller cards for the drives. Windows still letters regular drives, so it can still handle up to 26 drives–XP Pro might very well have some way to go beyond that even, but I haven’t heard of it.
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- Any mobo now can run 2 SATA + 4 IDE drives (either hard-drives or CD/DVD’s), and then each additional card can run up to four more of each. 4-port controller cards (for either IDE or SATA) cost around $50 each. Any mobo can use controller cards, they’re just regular PCI cards. Then the only thing you need is a case that can handle fitting all of this, which might cost a bit, a couple hundred dollars or so. I know I’ve seen them around. You might want to get a stiff power supply for it too, name-brand 500W+, definitely.
Ten drives run in normal mode isn’t a lot, really. It’s just a lot for a typical home-PC. Looking at NewEgg I found a “CHENMING 901AD-SILVER-0 Silver Computer Case - Retail” for $66 that has 6 internal 3.5" bays and 6 external 5.25" bays–but you can put mobile racks into five of the external 5.25 bays, making them hold a 3.5" hard drive. There’s also a beige version for $71. Either of these would give you six internal hard drives and five mobile-racks, for eleven hard drives (one for the OS and leaving one 5.25" bay for a CD-boot drive I am assuming, +ten for storage). A good power supply might cost you $125 or so beyond that. Mobile racks cost $20 or so per bay. ~$300 total.
…There used to be a cheap(ish) cube-shaped case around that had like 14 internal HD bays, but I can’t find it now… :\
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- Well there’s a few there it seems that would be possible to use. The Lian-Li cases all have twelve internal bays, but the cheapest one starts at $250 and there’s no power supply included. There’s some silverstone cases with 8 internal bays as well starting at $150, also with no power supplies.
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That site (newegg) lets you search for cases based on the number of internal and external drives they hold. A “mobile rack” kit is a hard-drive accessory that costs maybe $15-$25 and is a drawer-type thing that fits into an external 5.25" bay and allows mounting a 3.5" hard drive. So you don’t need a case that has 8 or 9 internal bays, you just need a case that can accomodate al the hard drives you want (in internal 3.5" + external 5.25" bays) plus (I would assume) at least one 5.25" bay left over for the boot-CD-ROM drive. But you’d have to figure the math to see which case + [however many needed mobile racks] would be cheapest.
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That much storage (about 4 terrabytes) is enough to store about 1,000,000 individual songs or abou 1,000 DVD movies. Might I ask what this is for?
A terabyte is no big deal. 3ware is your friend. Or get yourself an external RAID assembly.
Don’t ignore redundancy or data recovery. You will get bitten.
Shouldn’t be an issue. I’ve got (4), 250 gig internal IDE HDs and (2) 250 gig + (1) 300 gig USB externals running right now.
One of the best deals out there are WD externals when on sale on sale at Circuit Ciity. I can get 250 gig USB2 externals for $ 120 each after rebates. Rebates are one per household so stagger your purchases. They also have 320 gig externals that occasionally go on sale.
You’ll need 2-3 USB2 hubs to yield the necessary USB prots.
See post #10.
More specifically, I’d read somewhere about a year ago about the future of the home entertainment system based on the PC. Everything would be loaded onto a central server and then everyone in the house could watch or listen to anything at any time without the need for individual devices (DVD players, stereos, etc). They were talking about prices in the thousands of dollars!
I figured I could build one myself for a lot less money and with a minimum of unnecessary software. Rather than overload my PC (I know Dell uses proprietary power supplies), I thought I could build a basic PC instead. It would not be connected to the internet and would not have any software other than that needed to play music and videos.
I was inspired, in part, by my MP3 player. I can, but don’t, use playlists. I just set it to play randomly. I could, if I want, play the songs by artist, album, or genre. I can also just pick whatever song I want.
I thought, well, why can’t I do it with video? That’s where the problem might come, though. How can I tell the unit to play video the same way?
Let’s say I wanted to watch any episode of a sitcom I have, followed by some music videos, and then a certain type of film?
I have seen people do this sort of thing in extreme computing magazines and I know I saw one on the net recently too. I am not sure about the software though. There must be something out there. You could write your own. Others will surely need it later.
Unfortunately, the current state of affairs makes it extremely difficult to be able to move data off of DVDs and onto a hard drive. Someone called Kaleidescape is being beaten to death by Hollywood for developing a movie server for home use.
We will say nothing more on the subject of putting DVDs onto a home media server or any other sort of hard drive. It’s just not an allowed subject here.
About the best you’ll be able to do legally is put your DVDs into a changer. Sony makes one that sells for about $350 and holds 400 DVDs or CDs. Unfortunately, it’s not networkable.
A Slingbox might or might not be able to move your movies around - it digitizes video and shuffles it to wherever you’re at via a LAN connection.
I don’t think such a machine would require software to play videos - how would video devices hook up to it? The requirements for storing such large files (lots of space, noisy ventilation, server-type OS) don’t match well with PVR-type hardware (small, quiet, fast graphics).
More typically, you would have a central file server (perhaps running some streaming audio software like IceCast or something from Slimp or whatever for radio-type listening) which stores all your media files, then you can use regular PCs, special audio devices (like slimp, etc), and MythTV boxes (or similar network video devices) to access these files.