[Tfug] SANs (Was: Re: In need of hard drive info)

[Harry McGregor]

Tom Rini wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 26, 2008 at 03:16:09PM -0800, keith smith wrote:
>
>   
>> I need to add a second drive to two of my boxes for back up purposes only.  I was looking on NewEgg and found prices have dropped more than I would have ever imagined.  

>> I know the original question has now been solved, but what I didn't see
>> mentioned really is a home-made SAN or a prebuilt SAN as your backup
>> method.

Are you looking at a SAN (block level) or NAS (File level) network storage?

Linux has a reasonable iSCSI stack (open-iscsi.org) that could provide
you with block level storage, though unless you have a really solid lan,
I would not recommend it.

Otherwise, I would look at NAS storage with Samba as your back end.
>>   Currently, I've got 120G (laptop) + 60G (kerry's laptop) + 200G
>> (desktop) to backup, and I've got an external 400G disk I rsync to
>> weekly.  But with 1TB drives being so cheap (at work we just threw 1
>> into each of our 3 clustered boxes for local, not-backedup /scratch)
>> you've gotta start wondering, when does it start making more sense to go
>> with either a commercial solution or something small, fast enough and
>> that can RAID5 a few drives.  Anyone got first-hand experiance here, at
>> home, work or both?
>>     

Be careful with RAID 5 moving forward, I would recommend either RAID6 or
RAID10.  Rebuild times for larger RAID5 arrays are getting longer and 
the stress of the rebuild can easily result in a second drive failure. 
We had a 15 drive RAID6 (750GB drives), well, 14 drives, 1 hot spare,
and it would take about 600 minutes for a rebuild.

I have 4 750GB drives waiting to go into a small RAID5 for iSCSI
purposes on the home lan, to experiment with a bit.  I would look at
both 1TB and 1.5TB drives, as they are getting VERY cheap.  Also dirvish
is great for rsync based/hard link based backups.


                   Harry