Re: New computer case - 23 bay

Iain Napier wrote:

Dorothy Bradbury wrote:
Frankly...
o Use 2 separate enclosures...
---- SCSI cases in their own case (tower style or 4U rack)
---- SATA etc in their own case (tower style or 4U rack)
o Use a single 8U rack case
---- probably large enough to hold everything
---- avoid with mobile drive racks & backplane (puts price way up)

For 200ukp you should be able to come up with something better.
You could CAD / lasercut / assemble something better for less,
only hassle is the PCI backplane dimensions have to be spot on.

*I* could?... No, *You* could :)

Thanks for the advice, judging by your response and your website you're
obviously a lot more clued up on this than I am. Do you have any opinion
on the case that Peter mentioned, or on this one?

http://www.overclock.co.uk/customer/product.php?productid=17916

I wouldn't mind going down the two separate cases route, but buying
anything in U's looks to be expensive, and the rack I have at home isn't
big enough to put it all in.

Alternatively consider...
o Selling your disks and moving to fewer large capacity disks
---- Cost-Spread wise it might be the cheaper solution & more reliable
o More HDs increase the probability of a single failure unless RAID.
---- I would perhaps change to all 4-6x SATA WD Raptor or Barracuda

Four of the SCSI disks are RAID-1, two doing Windows, and two doing
profiles/home directories. I could lose the other two. The SATA disks
store media and are in a permanent cycle of upgrading, I currently have
around 2TB in SATA disks and upgrade them as and when I can afford it,
removing a smaller one and putting a larger in its place. Until a 2TB
disk comes out, and at an affordable price, I think I'll always have the
number I have. But by then I'll have more stuff to put on them, catch 22 :-)


Iain,

What I'm wondering here is if that you've invested this sum on your
hardware, you obviously have very valuable data stored.

What's your backup regime?

It also sounds as though you have made things *far* more complicated
than they need to be - eg. having separate arrays for Windows and
profiles/home directories. Is this really necessary? Is this a server
supporting 1,000 users?

What I think you should consider is RAID 6... With a decent RAID card
(I use an Areca 1220) the performance is acceptable, and 2 drives can
fail simultaneously without bringing everything to a grinding halt.

And, yes - drive cooling is critical. I am currently working on
recovering a 6-drive RAID 5 array. All SCSI 10K drives. All stacked
one on top of the other in what is practically a sealed cage. I placed
some sensors within the RAID stack and found the temperature (of the
housing) reached 77.6 degrees C. This means components on the hard
drive logic boards (and within the hard drives themselves) were over 100
deg. C. Hopelessly inadequate cooling, and probably the reason for the
RAID array failing in the first place. This is in a Compaq "server"
system... which is supposed to be able to handle this sort of thing.

I added my own cooling, which brought the temps down to 30 degrees.

23 drives (or anything approaching that number) is going to need an
awful lot more than extractor fans in the case - it would probably take
8 or 10 x 120mm fans blowing over the drives from the outside. (I work
on 1 x 120mm fan per 3 or 4 drives.)

The fans I use are all supplied by our resident perfectionist, Dorothy.
Nothing else does the job.



Odie
--
Retrodata
www.retrodata.co.uk
Globally Local Data Recovery Experts
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: A8N SLI Deluxe Question
    ... > Currently the drives are partitioned and my apps are on one partition. ... Someone suggested using RAID 0. ... The media rates for disks are still in the ~70MB/sec range ... the array reports certain errors. ...
    (alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.asus)
  • Re: Exchange Disks
    ... I was looking at using a cheaper alternative with 7,200 RPM Server SATA ... Logs raid 1 mirror ... consider single drives for the OS and or Logs instead of mirrors. ... Is there some sort of rule-of-thumb for setting up disks based on a number ...
    (microsoft.public.exchange.setup)
  • Re: Beginning to think about VMware and SCO 5.0.5
    ... faster 15K drives will provide ... I am now gun shy of SCSI RAID: On 6/12 I was called at 19:50 ... the two RAID1 disks in the primary were down ... and the nightly backup was restored to it. ...
    (comp.unix.sco.misc)
  • Re: New Lightwave Workstation
    ... Id imagine it's better to install a PCI Sata raid controller card rather than run off the motherboard for performance reasons. ... I've always gone with RAID 0 as I don't need the redundency on drives that are used just for rendering. ... | from several disks at once to make up the file. ...
    (comp.graphics.apps.lightwave)
  • Re: Review of new design - Please
    ... "Do I need separate physical disks for each of the above sets?" ... The reason to separate them as a best practice is because of I/O types. ... better perforamance and space with RAID 1+0 than you could with just RAID 1. ... RAID 5 typically incurs a write penalty to update parity across the drives, ...
    (microsoft.public.exchange.design)