Finally!
I have five 250GB IDE hard drives that I bought from Nate (thanks Nate!) a while ago. I also have some old gear that I picked up with a Xeon motherboard and CPU.
But the motherboard is in a 1RU case. It’s hard to shoe horn five hard drives into a 1RU case. (Yes, with the right case you can do it, but with an EATX motherboard that is 12″ x 13″, it’s not likely.)
I finally got enough spare cash together and bought a new 4RU case. It looks like a nice case, it’s got six 5-1/4″ bays and two 3-1/2″ bays. So I can get my five 250GB drives in there as a RAID 5 array, a pair of 40GB drives mirrored for the OS and a CD ROM drive for installation. (I hope the 550W power supply can drive it all.)
Then I’m going to install the latest release of OpenFiler on it.
I’m also going to borrow a pair of dual-channel IDE crontroller cards from Nate (thanks again Nate!) and build up the RAID arrays using the software RAID in the OpenFiler distro (rPath Linux.) I’ll have six IDE channels and if the motherboard has multiple PCI busses I should be okay for performance. I have to find the specs for the motherboard still. It’s a SuperMicro something or other. (Judging from the pictures and the specs, I think it’s a X5DPE-G – but I’ll look at the board tonight and find out for sure.)
Then I’ll run some performance tests on it. I want to know if it’s worth the trouble of backing up my existing filer (with about 200GB on it) to something (don’t know what yet) so that I can use the MegaRAID i4 card that I have in my existing OpenFiler.
My gut feeling is that the software RAID will be plenty fast, but I don’t know for sure.
Then after I get my new OpenFiler built I can redirect all the Windows users My Documents folders to it and start doing real backups to my DLT drive! How awesome will that be?
I figured out how to do the redirection with a group policy so no matter which machine you log into you get your My Documents folder. It’s a pretty cool Windows hack, plus the end user doesn’t even have to know it’s happening, so they don’t have to be told to ‘save your data to the H drive’ or anything. It just happens!
And how geeky will it be to be able to state that I have One Terabyte in my basement? (Remember when a terabyte was an unimaginable amount of space?)
