AlexHopmann.com

So I have a nice new storage array going for my home using the Sans Digital ESATA case, 4 WD Greenpower drives, and the Silicon Image ESATA card that came with the Sans Digital enclosure. The card comes with software called SATARAID5 that appears to mostly work just fine- it was easy to setup a RAID5 array with my 4 disks, and while I can’t dynamically add more disks too it (it looks like there is some other newer software that supports that kind of thing), overall it works well with one major exception. Before I mention that I should add that I’m just looking for some good reliable mass storage. This isn’t a “backup”, it doesn’t need the highest performance storage possible (although faster is always better), and all that. I’ve tested yanking a hard drive out of the array in mid-file copy and putting it back in later and it rebuilds (takes about 24 hours) but is fine.

The big catch is that everytime I reboot my system it does a rebuild- the management app has a nice UI that says that “Group 0 Volume A was not shutdown properly”, and it kicks off the rebuild which takes a very long time. So far those rebuilds have worked great but its really annoying to have degraded performance and reliability after every reboot.

Anyone have any experience with this stuff or ideas? Is there some way to manually shutdown the volume before I reboot? Some bug fix version that fixes this issue (I’m running SATARAID5 version 1.5.2.1 on Vista 32-bit).

On Friday I finally got all the bits together for me new home RAID array. This one is a Sans Digital TR4M 4-space ESATA enclosure plus 4 Western Digital GP 1TB drives. Building it as Raid5 it looks like the total capacity will be 2.8TB (as the computer measures it, not as the drive companies market it).

I started it formatting, skipping the “quick format” option. That was over 24 hours ago and its at 36% right now. Which points out one of the biggest problems with large drive arrays (or any kind of large storage)- if you aren’t careful managing it can be a total mess. This does make me a bit happy that I decided to go with just the 4-drive array rather than holding out for a full 8- the bigger one would be even more of a mess to manage at times.

The hard drive in my Dell laptop started acting poorly so I’m trying to replace it with a solid state drive. Being too cheap to go spend $600 on an “off the shelf” SSD I’m trying to make one using a CF->SATA adapter and a 32GB CF card. Total cost $160.

The only catch is it doesn’t work so far. The Vista install dies part way through “uncompressing files”. Same with XP. At this point I’m wondering if the problem is my CF card (RiDATA 32GB 233X) or the adapter?

Any thoughts? Anyone get this working? There is a really cool looking adapter that lets you use 3 CF cards, but its $180 and its only from geekstuff4u where the shipping to the US is another $45. I can’t find that part from any US place.

1TB hard drive prices appear to be falling quickly as competition heats up. Western Digital came out with their “green” drive that can spin down from 7200 to 5400rpm to save energy and Fry’s is already selling them for $265. This represents a price drop of 25% in the past month. I suppose its not surprsing given that the market has gone from a single vendor to three. In any case, it looks like good news for building big storage arrays.

I’ve been giving some thought to upgrading one of my home RAID arrays lately. I currently have two 6-drive arrays attached to a single server via LSI MegaRAID SATA controller cards. One is using 250mb drives for 1.25gb capacity and the other is using 400gb drives for 2gb capacity. So far they have been operating fairly well.

While more capacity is nice, reliability is the most important thing. I bought that first array back in June 2004, which is just over 3 years ago. If I recall from the Google research on hard-drive reliability (ironic note- I couldn’t find the actual study with a quick Google, only lots of articles about it), age is one of the big factors towards failures, with lots of failures starting to happen when drives get to be about 3 years old.

So one question is about an upgrade process. I have lots of practice with simple usage of this array, at least enough to know not to pull multiple drives all at once. But to be honest I have not ever done anything complicated. Can I upgrade the drive size by just pulling the drives one at a time, replacing each with a bigger drive, waiting for it to rebuild until everything is balanced again?

Or is it much safer to copy everything somewhere else? This sounds like a pain since its 1TB, but then again with drive sizes now getting 1tb of free space somewhere else isn’t as hard as it used to be, just a bit slow.

Wider availability of the new 1TB drives has had the hoped-for result lowering hard-drive prices across the board over the last month. Drives larger than 250GB have decreased a bit more than 10% in one month. The 500GB drives remain the price per GB leader costing about $.18 per GB (as low as $88 for a 500GB drive). Heading up to 750GB doubles the price and increasing to 1TB almost doubles the price again. Still its nice to see the 750GB drives dip well under $200 and the 1TB drives available for as low as $350 instead of their launch price of $400. The Seagate 1TB drives have not really hit the market in a meaningful way so hopefully things will dip even lower once the Hitachi has some competition.