Hard drive quandry

Khannie

So I got a message from my OS today that my primary hard drive is failing.

Along with the main hard drive I have a raid 5 array (3 x 750G drives giving me 1.5TB of storage in total). These are for media and they serve it out to 2 other computers in the house (a htpc and a laptop).

I have about 100 euro of a budget to play with.

When I bought the 750G drives they were top of the line, but I note that I can buy 1.5TB of storage for around 100 euro now. When they're in raid 5 I get very good performance out of them. Around 180MB/s read and around 100MB/s for write.

Also around that price are 32G SSD's.

So....I'm thinking: I could buy a 1.5T drive now and use that for the media without redundancy, just backing up important stuff (photos really) to the raid 5 array which I'd use as my main drive. That would allow me to add another 2 drives later and bump it to 3TB raid 5. Now I don't really need 1.5T or anything like it for my main drive so that seems kinda wasteful.

32G isn't great shakes for the SSD. Just makes things a bit tight.

Are there other options that I'm not considering / that you'd recommend?

Khannie

Actually, this is probably better suited to B&U....

Solitaire

Two more 750GB drives for the array? :P

On a more serious note: depending on capacity requirement get one 320GB-1TB Samsung F3 (pretty fast on sustained reads) for the primary system drive and if you have the spare change drop in another 750GB drive for the array.

Not pushed on blowing all that money on a small SSD for the OS and nothing else; if this system's also acting as a fileserver it'll be on most of the time and the benefits of a SSD won't really be seen if you're not turning the server on and off every five minutes or so You're already halfway there with a well-maintained F3 anyway tbh and the price and capacity advantages are overwhelming.

alexlyons

Agree with solitaire on the SSD. Basically the only benefit of SSD's are if you're reading and writing a huge amount of data very quickly, booting the machine or opening programs. The only benefit in the program scene is the first time they're opened, when opened once on a HD they're cached and the speeds are pretty similar for reopening.

In terms of what to buy, I'd say get a reasonable size drive for your OS, maybe a 320. If all your media is on the RAID array then this drive doesn't need to be huge. Save your €'s or expand the array, but don't waste money on a drive that won't be used. DO bear in mind that you should keep about 20% of your main drive free, so factor that in when deciding.

So basically, do what he said ^^ plus a bit more

edit: sorry my mac brain was talking, changed app's to programs

Khannie

alexlyons wrote: »

edit: sorry my mac brain was talking, changed app's to programs

It's ok...I'm a linux geek anyway.

I like your thinking gents. Not sure if I have a spare SATA port for a 5th drive though.

edit: It's worth pointing out that although it's a file server, it's also my main computer.

alexlyons

Khannie wrote: »

It's ok...I'm a linux geek anyway.

I like your thinking gents. Not sure if I have a spare SATA port for a 5th drive though.

edit: It's worth pointing out that although it's a file server, it's also my main computer.

No worries, just wanted to change it if anyone else was reading and didn't quite get it, thought you'd understand!

If you don't have a spare sata port, I hear an upgrade coming on!!
You could stick in a PCI card with a few more, they're only about 20 quid on ebay...

Not sure how your edit affects it, maybe you'd enlighten?

Solitaire

Khannie wrote: »

I like your thinking gents. Not sure if I have a spare SATA port for a 5th drive though.

What kind of motherboard do you call that?! :P

It's worth pointing out that although it's a file server, it's also my main computer.

I assumed that, but seeing as turning it off would deny the network access to the arrayed files I assumed you'd leave the machine on idle for long periods rather than knocking it off at the mains.

alexlyons wrote: »

If you don't have a spare sata port, I hear an upgrade coming on!!

+1 :P

You could stick in a PCI card with a few more, they're only about 20 quid on ebay...

That could work for drives outside the array but the arrayed drives are controlled via the mobo's ports via software so once you run out of mobo ports you can't expand the RAID arrays laterally any further

alexlyons

Solitaire wrote: »

That could work for drives outside the array but the arrayed drives are controlled via the mobo's ports via software so once you run out of mobo ports you can't expand the RAID arrays laterally any further

a shite you could move the main drive to a pci sata, although you'd need to make sure the pci can have the boot drive on it, some can, some can't. Little bit extra for the privilege.

Solitaire

Just buy an IDE optical drive! :P

alexlyons

Solitaire wrote: »

Just buy an IDE optical drive! :P

I'd offer one but its only CDRW :eek:

Khannie

Solitaire wrote: »

That could work for drives outside the array but the arrayed drives are controlled via the mobo's ports via software so once you run out of mobo ports you can't expand the RAID arrays laterally any further

In fact linux offers software RAID in the kernel, isolating you from controller shenannigans like that and it's what I'm using for the raid 5 so I could actually add an extra controller card I suppose.

An upgrade is definitely *not* on the cards. I just couldn't justify it given how little i use the computer for high end computing these days.