RAID-5 Network Area Storage Solution or Something Similar

[ylon]

I need to create a RAID-5 array for redundant storage on my network, but I’m trying to keep it as affordable and as scalable as possible. I would like to start off with about 500GB or perhaps closer to 1TB. I’ve deliberated over setting up a linux box to drive it and host it (using reiserfs 4) and then serve things off of a Mac Mini or another box with Server installed. I’m tired of loosing so many drives lately (in my consulting business we’ve seen 80+ hard drives go bad across the state and locally a bunch of other drives go out on customers ranging from home consumers to SCSI drives; seems like something is up at the moment with all of the mfgs as I’ve never seen such a failure rate before). Heck, I’ve lost three of my own lately, one of which was an external backup as well as the original drive that had the data, so that was quite a loss.

I am wanting to get this redundancy in place and at a later time actually back off to to perhaps a distributed fs across all of the workstations. I was wanting to set up a gigabit network and hoping that will be fast enough to flow data around my fairly small network (under 15 workstations). My workstation has much higher demands than any of the others as I do video and 3D work as well as general programming, etc.

I’d like to even, if possible, keep my applications installed on the external array.

Another point is that I’d like to run some daemons that will constantly be checking SMART as well as testing for bad blocks and telling me when hardware failure is imminent so that I can either hotswap or plug a new drive in and let it rebuild. I’m fearful that I might have to go with some sort of hardware RAID device for that, but I just can’t find anything really good aside from some offerings from some of the larger manufacturers.

Any ideas or solutions that you’ve seen work? It would be great if I could afford an Xserve with Xraid + Xsan, but that’s just not possible.

[Anonymous]

I’m really surprised that there aren’t any thoughts or answers to this yet.

[ylon]

Thanks much for the reply. Yes, that is certainly a large number of failures. I’m starting to wonder if there is something wrong with our geographical region in terms of some sort of electromagnetic fields! I just had a laptop hard drive go bad on my while on a business trip this week with bad blocks!!! Very, very disturbing.

Do you think that it would be more wise to set up a software RAID-5 Linux server and then serve that via NFS to a Mac OS X Server and then in turn serve everything out from there?

If not, and going with straight hardware RAID 5 for OS X, what is recommended? I’d certainly like to get something that I can expand quite a bit, but also not break the bank.

Anyone looked into or used OpenAFS on Mac OS X since that is apparently workable on OS X?

Thanks much.

[ylon]

FYI, here is the 17 March announcement of support for Tiger on the OpenAFS mailing list:

http://lists.openafs.org/pipermail/openafs-announce/2006/000145.html

This could prove a very interesting experiment by the AFP548 folks and the community!

[Anonymous]

The one true bad thing about doing software raid is that you’ll end up with a system that is down whenever something goes bad.
I’ve had numerous problems with this where a drive goes bad in a raid 5 and we need to go out to the site to fix it.
Since then we have installed a hardware raid card and now it’s very nice.

Also we set up a SMS notification if a drive actually stops working so we will know pretty fast and can fix it before something else happens to another drive.

[stepansae]

Hi Ylon,

I use very cheap hardware solution …

HighPoint RocketRAID + 2x 4xMultilane SATA cables + cheap SATA HDD external enclosure (for up to 8 drives) fited with SATA hard drives.

I got RAID5 accross 8 drives but I originaly started with 4 only and expanded later …

Array is mounted like any other external drive, and I don’t have to worry about any NFS or other connections to another machine.

One might find a drawback in a fact that RocketRAID has only WEB based managment.

I got the card in G5 Xserve but I also tested it on standard tower G5 …

[Author]

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