Lots of storage

[ciphergoth]

If I buy one of these: and five of these:

and stick it all together using Linux software RAID, will that work as a relatively cheap (£370) 2TB RAID-5 storage array?

Will it be very noisy, and if so, should I be looking at getting one of these too so I can stick it in another room?



As you might imagine, I'm giving the whole question of backups a lot of thought at the moment...

Comments

[olethros.livejournal.com]

Curious to know why you'd suggest raid 1 and a hot spare over raid5?

[skx.livejournal.com]

It strikes me that when you have a lot of drives in the same physical location a single problem is liable to affect multiple drives at roughly the same time.

For example vibration, heat, flood damage(!), etc, are both going to be shared across neighbour drives - even if those at the "far side" of the enclosure are OK.

To compensate for that I'd arranage the drives (physically) in a pattern like this:

[md0-1][md1-1][spare][md0-2][md0-3]

(The idea is that adjacent pairs of disks come from different RAID sets - and with this arrangement any two contiguous drives can die without a problem.)

For RAID-5 if you have two drives die at the same time you're toast, regardless of location.

[nikolasco.livejournal.com]

Not just the same physical location, but also the drivers are from same manufacturer and bought at the same time from the same place... It jus seems likely that once one gives up due to foo, they all will.

At home, I've always tried to have enough slots to have completely empty ones between drives.