Home › Forums › OS X Server and Client Discussion › Misc. › RAID on the cheap?

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  • November 23, 2005 at 7:28 pm #364187
    PhillyMJS
    Participant

    I need to add some storage to the OS X Server I’m going to be migrating to at home. I wanted a RAID-5, but the prices are a little out of reach for personal use.

    I want enough space to make it worth my while (at least 500 Gigs) and redundancy/fault tolerance is a concern… this rig will be holding backups of important stuff from my other Macs, as well as being a repository for quite a bit of data. Failing RAID-5, I want to have four identical drives in a RAID 0+1 configuration, which will give me one large volume that is mirrored. Which reminds me, can Tiger’s Disk Utility do that sort of thing, stripe drives A & B and C & D and then mirror volumes AB and CD? Tape backups aren’t cheap either, so I plan to connect an external FireWire drive occasionally to back up my most critical data.

    Anyway, I’ve been doing quite a bit or research w/r/t four-drive enclosures vs. putting two drives in the Mac and two in an enclosure, hot swap enclosures vs. shut-down-and-disassemble type enclosures, build-your-own vs. prebuilt enclosures, etc. I like the hot swappability and drive trays with the LCDs that give a little feedback on drive health, since those are features I like about RAID-5.

    Lately I’ve been looking at multi-drive enclosures and like this one. I plan to throw in four OEM 250GB or 300GB SATA drives from NewEgg, and use a FirmTek SeriTek/1VE4 card in the server (a dual G4/450) to drive it. Total for everything comes to just over $900, including shipping.

    Before I pull the trigger on ordering all this stuff, I’d like to collect a few opinions to see if there’s a better way to go about it. Does anyone know of a reputable dealer selling barebones hardware RAID-5 units, or have any other suggestions?

    November 23, 2005 at 8:07 pm #364189
    Anonymous
    Guest

    Well, Speaking from first hand experience you are going to pay up for a RAID 5 controller. I did install a Cooldrive rig for a friend and it works OK. However, I did not install this on OS X Server. I have another friend who tried to install the cooldrive setup on his G5. It was a no-go. He wound up returning the setup to Cooldrive. He is still trying to get a refund 4 months later. Tiger Server may allow you to fine tune the drives. One of the issues with the setup is configuring the RAID 0 to use the faster portion of the disk. The drives all spin at around 3500 rpm after being setup with Disk Utility, so you are not getting the max speed out of them. AFAIK, Tiger Server Disk Utility does not allow you to control block size. You might be better off going with an ATTO Card and save yourself some aggravation. Regarding tape drives, if you do not need a history of backup going back several years, then by all means use hard drives. However, I would not trade my tape drive for anything. I use an AIT drive and it has saved my bacon on more than one occasion. I also run a 3 drive RAID 1. Hope this helps…

    November 23, 2005 at 8:55 pm #364191
    Waragainstsleep
    Participant

    I was thinking about a low cost RAID unit. I was considering dedicating an old PCI PowerMac G3 for the purpose. I thought I could use some sort of PCi RAID card for the drives, and run it over the network. Also wondered about the possibility of using link aggregation (if thats the right term) to boost the throughput. An extra gigabit ethernet card in each machine (RAID and server) is no great expenditure. The trick would be the software. If it can be done under Jaguar server or Panther server, I figure I can pick up a cheap license since we have two Xserves at work which shipped with Panther server, and have been upgraded since, so the original licenses are sitting about unused. The other way to do it would be to run some flavour of *NIX. I have no idea how good an idea this sort of setup is.

    November 23, 2005 at 9:17 pm #364192
    Anonymous
    Guest

    As I understand you, the RAID unit would be attached to the Server? Not an internal setup? I would head over to http://www.tomshardware.com and look at the reviews on RAID setups. I seem to recall one that supported Mac OS X. Don’t forget about some sort of Gigabit switch to link everything together. I have no affiliation with toms’ site. You could also look at Softraid(softraid.com) as a solution, but it only supports RAID 0 or 1….

    November 23, 2005 at 11:38 pm #364195
    PhillyMJS
    Participant

    Thanks for your replies. I did a little more poking around and found a reasonably-priced SATA PCI card that does RAID-5, the RocketRAID 1810A (yes, they specifically mention Mac support). NewEgg has it for $169. I read the manuals, and I like what I saw.

    The absolute cheapest I can come up with is 3 Maxtor MaxLine III 250GB SATA drives in RAID-5 configuration, mounted in the server. Including cables and estimated shipping, it’d be under $520, for ~500GB of usable space with fault tolerance.

    I really like the idea of the external enclosure, though, and that ups the price by about another ~$275 at the minimum. I may just suck it up to save some cash now and go with a RAID-5 made from 3 300GB drives in the server. I can always transplant them later into an external enclosure (and maybe even add a fourth drive) if my storage needs increase.

    And yes, when I move to the new server I’m also upgrading my network infrastructure to use GigE. 🙂 I only have to plunk in a switch that supports it, everything else is already in place, or will be once I move to the new server.

    ~Philly

    September 20, 2006 at 2:16 am #367072
    Anonymous
    Guest

    Resurrecting this old thread:

    I have a RAID5 system in a G3 powermac.

    Uses 3 x 300gb SATA drives connected to a RocketRaid 2220 8-port pci card that I got off ebay for £150.

    Also have a cheap gigabit card that I found for £10.

    Brought the powermac G3 for £50 from a friend, with 1gb ram.

    All works fine. Soon to insert a 4th 300gb drive. With the 20gb ide boot drive and the DVD drive, that means 6 drives in there. I think there’s room to insert a few more with some bodging.

    Removed modem, zip disk, some metal bits, motherboard speaker etc to help airflow.

    If I was to do it again, I would go with a low end powermac g4 – has better bus, integrated gigabit, wake-on-lan, beefier power supply, better energy management.

    email me at tomato(att)spc.org if you want more details, I don’t usually read these forums.

    Came here by google as I was wondering if I have the only powermac G3 RAID5 system in the world 🙂

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