So... nobody has a problem with that Promise card? It doesn't come with memory, so I think I would get a 64MB stick (the minimum).

For ATA ("IDE"), the consensus is that these guys http://www.3ware.com/ rule.

Cheers

The card seems okay. There is a review on storagereview where it compared it against an Adaptec card (this one was best) and the previous generation Escalade card. It wasn't the best performance but it was good for what you pay.

[edit]Oops. It's a SuperTrak SX6000 on that review...[/edit]

RAID5 doesn't seem to be supported on their 32-bit cards

Bummer.

Not really. They're expensive. I'm glad the cheaper card has more functionality.

I just bought the SX4000 and 3 160GB Samsung drives.

Hey Rob, where did you buy those drives? I tried searching with the model number you posted here, but didn't find anything.

I ended up getting these from newegg. I am not sure what the model # discrepancy is all about (missing a leading zero), but I would imagine they're the same drives.

Ah, yeah I see the problem. Odd. Although is seems the entire internet sees them without the zero, so maybe Samsung is listing their products weirdly.

Anyway, those look cool. Good luck!

Hmmm, I was pretty sure the (often affordable, eBayable) 3ware 6410 supported RAID5.

I love and respect the 3ware cards, but in your shoes might just set up mirroring with one of the Arco Duplidisks. What 3Wares (and most RAID cards) *don't* give you is teh ability to swap in pairs of larger disks later on to expand your array size (which is why I like the dumb Duplidisks). I would opine more thootfully on this but I just drove in from the coast (from Portland to Boston in 3 days) and I gotta take a shower and nap.....

I believe it does too Jim, but they also did have a version optimised to work with RAID 5 sold as 6450, how big of a differance there was between a 6410 and a 6450 I don't know.

So you are using a defective drive, one that you know is defective, and complaining about its reliablility, and therefore the reliability of all such drives?

I wasn't using that drive to base my reliability claim on ATA drives, just stating that too many people get a false sense of security with SMART and such. If that drive shouldn't have been setting off SMART alerts months ago, I don't want to see a drive that does trigger an alert.

I've only ever seen one drive give SMART warnings and that was a drive that was in a rather battered laptop. It did actually kind of work but had a transfer rate of about 1k/s as Windows would load but slooooowly.
All of the other dud drives I've got just died suddenly without any warning.
SMART is more for giving you a probability that the drive is going to be bad rather than actually warning you of impending failures. It basically keeps statistics e.g. power on hours, CRC errors, seek times and if the values exceed the preset thresholds then it will warn you.

UPDATE:

I got the machine together (finally) earlier this week but determined that 320GB was probably not enough. I decided to add another 160GB drive for a total of 480GB in RAID5. Well, I got my 4th drive in today and quickly hooked it up.

It seems this FastTrack SX4000 works.

Mmmmmm....447GB....Droooool...

The problem is that that's a lot of data to lose should something go horribly wrong.

The problem is that that's a lot of data to lose should something go horribly wrong.

I certainly hope if all this pr0n^H^H^H^Hdata is important to you, you have a more permanent backup?

In all seriousness, "something horrible" means two drives failing at the same time.. Short of your entire PC bursting into flames, that seems highly unlikely. The really, really, really important subset of that data should be put on CD/DVD and stored in a safe. The rest is probably very safe in a RAID5 array, assuming your RAID card/drivers/etc. are up to snuff.

That's what I meant by "horribly wrong." I could see it happening. Then again, re-acquiring 500GB worth of pr0n could be fun too.

Well, it's safe from drive failures. It's not safe from user errors, or computer or raid controller failures.

Matthew

Another thing that can screw up RAID paritions is unplugging the drives and then plugging them in again but in the wrong order. I kinda of did this once, ended up forgetting to plug one of the drives in with a RAID 5 set. That cost mea day of rebuiliding when I realized my mistake.. Leaving two unplugged may have been disastrous..

Mmmmmm....447GB....Droooool

Admittedly, it wasn't configured for RAID, but on my Linux box recently...

offbeat:/# df -H

Filesystem             Size   Used  Avail Use% Mounted on

/dev/hda1              7.4G   460M   6.6G   7% /

/dev/hda3               31G   6.6G    23G  23% /home

/dev/hdm1              6.9G   1.7G   5.0G  25% /mnt-m1

/dev/hdm3               71G    15G    53G  22% /mnt-m3

/dev/hdo1               79G    64G    12G  85% /mnt-o1

/dev/hde1              248G    34M   235G   1% /mnt-e1

/dev/hdg1              248G    34M   235G   1% /mnt-g1

/dev/hdi1              248G    34M   235G   1% /mnt-i1



That's a grand total of 870 GiB :-)



...and I've still got 8 IDE connectors[1] left.

What controller are you using?

Highpoint RocketRAID 404. On that machine, there's also 4 IDE headers on the motherboard (2x VIA Ultra66, 2x Promise Ultra100).

The other thing about redundant systems is that you have to pay attention to failures.

A parallel example is the triad lisence server where I work. Typically, the SAs never notice anything is wrong until the third server in the triad dies. Would you trust these guys with RAID.

The other thing about redundant systems is that you have to pay attention to failures.

Agreed. I take a walk at least every two days by the servers I help manage at work. No red lights, I keep walking, otherwise I check to see what the failure was. Redundant fans, power supplies, and hard drives all make it very clear when they fail.

One day I'll get the agents loaded on the machines so they can just page me. That way, noone using these servers will ever notice any failures.

One day I'll get the agents loaded on the machines so they can just page me

Or at least get everything onto one screen. One of the companies I'm involved in, BaseN, is selling network monitoring and performance measurement services based mostly on SNMP. But their system can show pretty much anything on the same screen, with alarm limits - so I actually abuse it to monitor machine room temperature, line voltage, house heating... and of course every single SNMP-monitorable parameter of all my systems. So I have stopped looking for red lights on the devices themselves

Cooool

But

How are you backing this up? If your reference to DAT/DLT is 'cos that's the backup mechanism then fine, disregard the rest of this post... but for anyone considering RAID read on...

I used to run RAID - it's fun, it's what big systems do, hey, it must be the right answer...

WRONG!! (or at least - it's not a slam dunk)

IMHO Most people shouldn't run RAID at home (well, not for mirroring anyway).
Mirroring means that both disks have the data written to them instantly - great.
Data is also blatted instantly if you accidentally do something bad - like corrupt a database, hit delete on the wrong directory etc etc. Even get a virus. And that's generally a lot more likely than a hard disk failure (unless you run IBM deskstars )

I suggest that you have seperately mounted disks and an automatic nightly (or hourly if you like) backup from drive A to drive B.

Then, when (not if!) you cock something up and get that chilled, scared feeling you find that your quiet backup disk is worth an awful lot...
This happened to me when I accidentally killed the partition with *all* my irreplaceable digital photos - whilst trying to replace the failed mirror drive - and believe me I nearly cried! (Luckily in my backup paranoia I'd copied this onto yet another spare partition 2 days before and all I lost were the date stamps - every photo is now 8/July/2002 10:22 - in the 30 seconds until I remembered this I was actually shaking - weird but true!)

For those who run a linux server look here:
http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/

Robricc, you sound like you have the know-how to run rsync on windows so take a look and see what you think...

Rsync
http://rsync.samba.org/
on windows:
http://optics.ph.unimelb.edu.au/help/rsync/rsync_pc1.html

By the way, rsync was written by Andrew Tridgell (of Samba fame) and is a way of comparing and synchronising data across a network without transferring all the data...

I use rsync nightly to sync all my data both onto a local backup server and also to another machine hung off a friend's DSL line. I now know that even if my house burns down my data (including 10GB of photos and 20GB of MP3s) is safe.

My remote server is a very cheap mini-itx based machine, so it cost less than a decent tape drive and is completely silent apart from the hard drive (which is important because it has to sit in a friend's house).

I obviously had to connect the remote server locally to do the initial transfer. Rsync then just sends the changes each day.

P.S. I have rsync configured not to duplicate deletes, then if I delete anything locally it doesn't dissappear from the mirrors. Occasionally I it with the delete option so that it cleans up stuff I have moved around.

P.P.S. I wish rsync was just a little bit more clever, so that it noticed when you had moved files and just moved the ones on the target, rather than duplicating them into the new location.

So how are you getting on with the drive/card/RAID Array?

I'm about to take the plunge on a very similar system (only on SATA, rather than ATA) using the Promise S150 SX4 (http://www.promise.com/product/product_detail_eng.asp?productId=112&familyId=2), so I'm curious how your experience has been so far.

I'm going for 4x160GB Maxtor SATA drives. (Total 480GB)

I take it that you didn't install Windows on that array as well?

Cheers,

Paul.