Large Reliable Array

spib · 8 Mar 2006 at 15:42

Hi,

I have around 0.7 TB of data spread over a few machines and I'm starting to worry about how long I have before I lose some of it (especially since some of the drives are maxtors).

What are my options for building 1TB of storage? If I were to use 250GB disks for example, how many would I need?

Cheers

Sigg · 8 Mar 2006 at 16:08

The easiest way would be to use a RAID 5 or 3 capable controller card with enough ports (like the XFX Revo64 5-Port) and 5 x 250GB drives, which will give you the combined capacity of 4 drives (about 930GB...).

spib · 8 Mar 2006 at 16:45

Thanks for that. Do all drives have to be the same size in this configuration?

Sigg · 8 Mar 2006 at 17:19

No, but it's a very good idea: the array will be based on the smallest drive, i.e. if you use 4 x 250GB and 1 x 200GB the useable array will be 4 x 200GB.

spib · 9 Mar 2006 at 09:34

Thanks for that. A couple more newbie questions if you don't mind

If I create an array with 3 250GB drives to begin with (giving 500GB total space), can I add new drives to the array without having to reformat the array?

If I use a 4 channel RAID card to begin with and then need to add extra channels what are my options? Can I simply add another RAID card and somehow 'join' the two arrays?

Thanks for the help

mcmad · 9 Mar 2006 at 09:50

I use 2 of the xfx cards with 10 X 300 gig hard drives in raid 3, they cant be joined (max 5 per card) but basically appear as 2 large hard drives.

Very easy to setup, plug them in & install the management software.

Not sure if existing data on the drives would be kept though, but once setup once you can add new HD's to the array without problems, no format of the array is required.

Sigg · 9 Mar 2006 at 11:43

spib said:
If I create an array with 3 250GB drives to begin with (giving 500GB total space), can I add new drives to the array without having to reformat the array?

I think some of the high end controller cards (££!) will let you extend an array - I don't know of any consumer level cards that do though. The other possibility is to use sofware RAID in Linux, I believe that you can extend software RAID arrays.

spib said:
If I use a 4 channel RAID card to begin with and then need to add extra channels what are my options? Can I simply add another RAID card and somehow 'join' the two arrays?

Same as above: some high end cards will let you build arrays that span different controllers. Software RAID is an option again.
Remember that as you increase the number of drives in an array you increase the chance of simultaneous drive failures. It might be unlikely that 2 or more drives fail in a short period of time, it's still possible though....