29Apr Running out of Hard drive space.
I was backing up projects to my server today, when I realized that I’m now down to 200GB of space. I think it might be time for an upgrade. Currently, there are 6 hard drives installed in this mess of a case. Two 500GB drives, and Four 1TB drives in RAID 1, grand total, 5TB with 3TB of usable space. When I upgraded my server a few years ago, 1TB drives where the way to go, now however, 2TB drives are down around $70 and 3TB drives are around $140. Basically this means I can get the same protection and space in 2 drives instead of 6. Add 2 more drives and I’ll have another 2 or 3TB of drive space to spare.
Hard drives are one of those things that everyone needs, but no one really feels like buying. I can spend $500 to keep my footage safe and I know it’s something I need to do, but then I start thinking, “I could just burn 20 or 30 DVDs and use the money leftover to buy a lens or lighting gear“. Sure it’s easy to think that way and you might even get away with it for awhile, but there will come a day when you’re trying to find a clip from that project you did last year. You dig through a whole spool of burned DVDs until you finally find the disk you need, but when you lift it out of the spool there’s a big gash across it, or worse, the reflective top has flaked off. This is actually how I ended up loosing a few of the special feature clips on one of the last big projects I worked on.
Thankfully, hard drive space keeps getting cheaper. Those 1TB Western Digital drives I bought a few years ago where around $180 a peace, now they’re down to around $50. Big hard drives also mean fewer hard drives (hopefully), so I probably don’t need all that noise cooling and temperature monitoring installed any more.
After the hard drive upgrade, it might be time to test out the Cat-6 in my house to make sure it can handle 10GBASE-T. Network drives work a lot better if you have a big pipe.
If any of you have setup any of these 3TB drives in RAID 1, let me know how it worked out. I had a few problems with a number of 1.5TB Seagate drives in RAID 1 when I was upgrading my desktop awhile back. For some reason one of the drives would go into sleep mode while files were being copied and cause the RAID controller to start a rebuild on what it considered a “failed drive”. The RAID rebuild took almost 12 hours every time it happened and I finally had to get 2 drives replaced before the problem was solved. I would like to try and avoid that kind of hassle this go around.
April 29th, 2011 at 8:47 am
Norco, a case manufacturer, has very affordable ATX cases that can fit up to 24 hard drives along with removable drive bays from $300-$400. A SAS (scsi form of SATA) HBA (host bus adapter) card from Supermicro is around $100, and a common SAS Expander card from HP is $250-$300. 24 drives in a case with storage infrastrucure for $800. Alternatively, instead of the HP SAS Expander card, if you wanted hardware RAID, there are cards from Areca, Adaptec, LSI, etc from $500-$1500 to do RAID. Otherwise, you can run the disks as single disks.
Here’s a link to one of my storage boxes.
http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/canon-eos-5d-mk-ii-hd/466267-storage-how-you-handling-5d-files-2.html#post1437638
You provide any CPU and motherboard setup, preferably with at least two x16 PCIe slots to accommodate a SAS HBA (sata card) , and a SAS Expander like the common HP SAS Expander to fill up 20-24 drives on the backplane of say the Norco RPC-4224 case.
Great forum support can be found at Hardocp’s data storage forum.
http://hardforum.com/forumdisplay.php?s=a90a0474b47c1b03afa73dfb42a17654&f=29
Norco RPC-4224 case
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811219038&Tpk=rpc-4224
Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8 SAS card
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816101358&cm_re=supermicro_sas-_-16-101-358-_-
HP SAS Expander
(to use all the SFF-8087 ports from the Supermicro SAS HBA card to the 6 ports of the backplane of the Norco case)
http://www.amazon.com/HP-468406-B21-Sas-Expander-Card/dp/B0025ZQ16K
Synergy, a HP reseller, gives really good deals also on this card
888-763-9920 – http://synergy.ships2day.com/
April 29th, 2011 at 11:36 am
That is one nice looking server case! Last upgrade I pulled out my external SCSI setup up and went to SATA drives. Not sure I really need 24 drive bays right now. I think 6TB (4x 3TB raid 1) in my server and the 3TB (4x 1.5TB raid 1) in my desktop should get me through another year or so. You’re right, I should probably switch over to a hardware raid controller and at the very least clean up my case. The other sad thing is my server is still running a 3.4 GHz P4. I might have spring for a little AMD Phenom II X4 840 3.2GHz combo on newegg, and upgrade.
How hot do your drives run crammed in there? Is there enough air flow?
April 29th, 2011 at 5:49 pm
The stock case includes a “wall” of 4 high speed delta 80mm fans. They are really noisy, so I removed them. You can get a bracket of 3 120mm fans instead from Norco. Look at the newegg link to see how the stock fans look like — they exhaust heat from the hard drives, and the two rear 80mm fans exhaust heat outside of the case.
I’m running in JBOD mode with about 10 SATA disks, and it works fine. You can use any intel cpu or amd cpu with a motherboard that at least has two x16 PCIe slots for a SAS HBA card.