On 09/14/2014 12:38 PM, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote: > On Sat, Sep 13, 2014 at 08:06:59PM -0400, Dan Ritter wrote: [...] >> It's almost certainly a real problem, and in my experience it is >> not the disk itself which is bad, but something in the path (the >> USB port, the USB cable, the USB-SATA interface) or the power >> supply for the disk. >> > > +1 - once upon a time, I needed a large array to build a local Debian > mirror so slung together a few 500GB external drives - the largest easily available > drives to make 1.5TB RAID5. It would last a couple of weeks, then something > would unmount one or more drives, then I'd take a week to get everything back in > order ... > > Using large external drives is fine for copying around large files and using rsync, making > backups and then disconnecting the large drive. Good quality SATA drives are really, really cheap and building > a machine as a storage server will cost little more than the largest external drives. Actually, I thought about this before buying the drives, because I did not like the idea of using external HDDs especially in a RAID and I have a few old machines available which could be easily set up for the task (and would be fast enough because their processors, although old are still faster than those of most NAS). Still, I decided against it (not knowing about the potential stability issues) because it would require me to always start and shutdown two machines to be able to access all data. Depending on how good/bad the suggested options work with my existing system, I am either going to try this once the drives fail or even buy some additional drives (I know that it is often said that "today drives are cheap" but for me being comparatively new to computing, 60€ are still much for a HDD) > Goodness, an HP Microserver fully made and ready for four drives costs about twice the cost > of a 4TB internal drive. > > If you have the luxury of a datacentre, then machines become cheap, relatively speaking, with small amounts of > storage. Adding 36TB of storage becomes feasible in a 4U box - it's expensive, but cheap compared to the cost > of running a datacentre ... the hard part is when you decide that you at home want greater than about 12TB > and don't want a server farm at home :) Unfortunately, I do not have a datacentre at hand or I would likely have used a dedicated machine for the task although the 2 TB extension is going to be enough for a long time. Thank you for sharing this info, Linux-Fan -- http://masysma.lima-city.de/
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