[clug] advice on drives for raid

[Andrew Janke]

> That looks like a nice setup, but space is a concern for me, which is
> why the (generic) 2RU box is what I'm very strongly aiming to use. It
> sits nice and discretely at the top of my rack and so stays out of the
> way :)

Ah, rackmount.  Well in this case if noise is not an issue, I am a big
fan of the Chenbro RM414, we have bunches of these things stacked with
1TB drives and either Areca or 3Ware 16 port SATAII raid cards. (both
multilane and "normal"). Mind you there is a nice Chenbro 3U JBOD
case:

   http://www.chenbro.com/corporatesite/products_detail.php?serno=104

Or just go a bit smaller:

  http://www.chenbro.com/corporatesite/products_cat.php?pos=16#

But then I reckon I am missing the point and you instead want to put
all of this in your existing 2U thing.

> I've reviewed my existing hardware, and I'm increasingly thinking my
> backup will be a couple of external USB disks (existing largish disks)
> which I can rotate to remote locations :)

We do this too via multiple 1TB disks in Antex MX-1 USB/eSATA
enclosures. USB is of course slower but last time I checked eSATA
support is not that crash hot in mainline kernels just yet.  You can
make it work via rescanning the scsi "bus" but this is somewhat
painful so instead we stick with USB. These disks are then sent
between sites as they have fairly large "bandwidth" when stuffed in
the post/backpack.

We even make mixed LVM's of internal (SATA connected) disks and
external (USB connected) disks in this way with no trouble (yet!).

> Most of the 2.7TB shared data doesn't require backing up (as it will be
> backup of existing DVD/CD media itself, so I can just rerip if needed)

Well in this case a couple of external USB things will work just fine
(aggregated via LVM/SW Raid). Then you can just unplug them at will.


-- 
Andrew Janke - andrew.janke at anu.edu.au
Department of Geriatric Medicine, ANU
(a.janke at gmail.com || http://a.janke.googlepages.com/)
Canberra->Australia +61 (402) 700 883