Hi Rob,
See comments below:
On Sunday 25 Nov 2012 11:23:53 Rob Malpass wrote:
> I'm trying to build a PC which has 8TB of storage - to be my media server.
> For the moment, I'm deliberately ignoring devices like microservers or
> Drobos - mostly on cost and the fact I have several towers with enough
> space to take 4*2TB drives. I've not built a PC for ages so I have a few
> questions:
Do you intend to use RAID 0 or LVM across the drives to give you 8TB? If so,
you might consider another smaller drive for the OS. It depends on how worried
you are about reliability. I would seriously consider RAID5 or similar, which
will still give you 6TB, which is actually loads of TV.
> 1) Is SATA still the bus of choice? According to Novatech, there is now
> "Serial attached SCSI". I don't think any of my mobos have this bus, and
> indeed it seems the drives sizes here are a lot smaller than I need - but
> is there anything pushing this over SATA?
SAS is around for servers, but SATA is more than sufficient for what you're
doing. Even if you were thinking of using a SATA port expander, you won't be
band-width limited by SATA.
eg.
http://compare.ebay.co.uk/like/110959611583?var=lv<yp=AllFixedPriceItemTypes&var=sbar&adtype=pla&crdt=0
> 2) Presumably I need a stronger power supply. If there are 4 hdds and 1
> DVD drive - what sort of wattage should I be looking at?
I have been running something similar with a 350W PSU from E-buyer for some
years now. However, I may have just been lucky.
> 3) If, expense notwithstanding for the moment, I did this as 4*2TB external
> USB hard drives, I've had trouble sharing these with Ubuntu before now.
> For some reason they're mounted under /media under a strange (and seemingly
> random) string of characters (which change every time the server is
> restarted) such that permanent shortcuts from other devices on the network
> wouldn't work and would need to be re-established each time I connect.
> Has anyone worked around this?
Ah, the joys of USB device evaluation. As others have said, you can mount
these as you would any other device. However, if you use USB interfaces
(except USB3) you will significantly drop the bandwidth to each disk, and
therefore reduce your transfer rates to a maximum of 480MBps (60MB/s) less
overhead across all disks which are connected to a given host channel. Don't
use USB, use a SATA port multiplier.
Cheers,
Tim B.
--
Hampshire Linux User Group Chairman
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