Thanks for all the comments, there are indeed many things to consider. Meanwhile found these:
http://terapix.iap.fr/hard/cluster/raid_config.html
http://home.fnal.gov/~yocum/storageServerTechnicalNote.html
http://pcbunn.cacr.caltech.edu/gae/3ware_raid_tests.htm
So it has been done before
On the hardware side, I think it is indeed a good idea to get a good main board, Intel E7500 based seems to work best. I found a large Antec case (plus1500B) that has already room for 14 drives, think I can easily modify this case to add another six bays. Power supply is 550 W, must be enough if we build in a separate power supply for the fans. The drive bays sold by 3ware look very good too, (3 drives in 2 ext 5 1/4" slots), but hey are quite expensive.
For the 2TB limitation, I hope to get around this by making RAID5 arrays (1750 GB each) on two 7500-8 controllers. Guess I can partition those with 2 or more linux raid partitions and then stripe these partitions. If not, I will try it with 2 4-disk RAID5 arrays on each board.
Best file system seems to be XFS. Looking at some of the benchmarks on the sites above, this seems very promising.
Fun project indeed !
On Thu, 2003-06-26 at 15:24, Florian Huber wrote:
On Thu, 26 Jun 2003 10:31:01 +0000 (UTC) Juri Haberland <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Karl Huysmans <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: ... > > I need to provide around 3 TB of disk space with a limited budget. > > The files I need to store are all HD video frames, typically in > > SGI format, file size around 8 MB each. The files will be accesed > > from an SGI IRIX workstations and from one Win2K box. All these > > have Gigabit ethernet interfaces. > > Forget about the idea building a 3TB fs. It won't work - regardless > of the file system. Maximum guaranteed size is 1TB; 2TB might work > if the moon is in the right place and you throw something (whatever) > over the left shoulder behind you ;) FYI the latest development kernels have an option to support larger block devices. (part of Kconfig:) Say Y here if you want to attach large (bigger than 2TB) discs to your machine, or if you want to have a raid or loopback device bigger than 2TB. Otherwise say N. But I suppose you do not want to use an unstable kernel for an critical server :) bye Florian Huber -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
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-- Karl Huysmans <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> |
