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

[nikolasco.livejournal.com]

I'd consider putting the RAID 5 layer under a RAID 0, MD-append, or LVM layer for the possiblity of expanding the array; otherwise it's problematic (the tool for expanding RAID 5 is not well tested and it's much more complex by necessity). I'm also not sure I see the point of RAID 5 without a hot (or at least a cold) spare on-hand.

I don't see what the NSLU2 buys you since the array doesn't appear to have a USB connection, just SATA. If you stick something between them, I'd go with a mini-ATX system with gigabit. I couldn't find smaller form-factor that had enough ports, but I also didn't look very hard.

I'd love to recommend Nexenta+ZFS but I've heard of problems with over 1TB of data (scrub/checksum-checking process hanging), even though that was a year ago it still makes me fret.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

You'd need some sort of SATA/USB adaptor to connect it to the NSLU2.