What To Do With a Hundred Hard Drives? 487
Makoto916 writes "In five years with my current employer as the IT administrator, I've amassed a sizable cabinet of discarded hard drives; just shy of 100, in fact. All of the drives range in size from 20GB up to 300GB. They've all been stored in anti-stat bags, and spot checks of even the oldest ones show that most of them still work. Individually, they're mostly useless for our line of work, which is digital video production. However, the collective storage potential is quite significant. They are of varying size and speed, but the one commonality is they're all IDE. What is the best way to approach connecting all of these devices and realizing their storage potential? On a budget, of course. Now, I'd never use such an array for critical data storage, but it certainly would be useful as a massive backup array to our existing SAN that does store critical data. I have several spare and functioning PCs, but not nearly enough to utilize their internal IDE controllers; even with multiple add-in controllers, it still wouldn't be enough. Not to mention the nightmare of managing a bunch of independent PCs. I've looked into ATA Over Ethernet and there's a lot of potential there, but current 15 to 20 bay AoE cabinets are expensive, and single device enclosures are so rare that they're also expensive. Are there any hardware hackers out there who have crafted their own home-brew AoE systems? Could they scale to 100 drives? Is there a better way?"
Thumper (Score:2)
Re:Thumper (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Thumper (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of sectors suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
2 Words... (Score:4, Insightful)
1 word: magnets (Score:5, Interesting)
You could build a climbing suit for climbing steel, build a generator,....
Re:1 word: magnets (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:1 word: magnets (Score:5, Informative)
Re:1 word: magnets (Score:5, Informative)
There are no magnetic monopoles in theory, either. Maxwell's four equations that define all of Electromagnetism, includes Gauss's Law of Magnetism. This law states that magnetic fields don't in net diverge.
Its usually written in differential form as: del * B = 0 (del dot B = 0). Note that Physics students from bush-league universities might write the equation in integral form, but that's either a product of their deficient education or maybe some kind of genetic defect.
More here (wikipedia):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauss's_law_for_magnetism [wikipedia.org] and here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell's_equations [wikipedia.org]
Yeah, I suppose magnetic monopoles might exist and then we'd re-write the laws, but there's no reason to assume so. There is a natural temptation to look at magnetism the same as electricity (individual charges, like electrons and protons, being analogous to "North" and "South" monopoles), but probably the most useful way to think of magnetism is as a relativistic effect of electrostatics... once you do that, there's no reason to assume any kind of magnetic monopole at all.
(/geek)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
As you write, the fifferential form of Maxwell's equations contains: del * B = 0.
However that does not make Maxwell's equations entirely inaccurate in the event a (or many) monopoles are found. If you think about the above equation, it states that the total magnetic field through a closed surface is a net balance. In the world as we know it this is a correct equation. But if monopoles exist the zero would be replaced by a variable (say m for the imbalance in magnetic particles). This is similar t
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Re:1 word: magnets (Score:5, Funny)
Impossible.
Just because you don't grasp physics doesn't make it go away.
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Re:2 Words... (Score:5, Funny)
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Are you crazy?? You need to dedicate at least two, redundant backups, and off-site tape storage for that...
That's like putting all your savings under a mattress -- you won't need to use it until one day, you get really desperate, but realize it's all gone
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Bunches of small drives (Score:5, Interesting)
between the power requirements and all the extra hardware needed to run them i would just sell them all on ebay and take the $ to buy a couple of huge drives, mirror and do iscsi with them.
Re:Bunches of small drives (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Bunches of small drives (Score:5, Interesting)
Absolutely. My advice: there are open source designs [opencores.org] for processors, IDE adapters and gigabit ethernet controllers that can be loaded onto FPGAs. There's not a lot you need to know beyond this to go and do it yourself.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think selling them on ebay is a good idea. You never know what kind of data might be recoverable.
Honestly, if you can't use them in-house, then keep collecting them and let your replacement deal with the mess when you leave for another job.
Re:Bunches of small drives (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Bunches of small drives (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Bunches of small drives (Score:5, Insightful)
Who has time to do that on almost 100 drives?
I use the sledge hammer method myself. Hit it until it sounds like a maraca when you shake it.
Re:Bunches of small drives (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably a guy who is trying to figure out how to hook up 100 ide drives into a backup system.
Re:Bunches of small drives (Score:5, Funny)
Who has time to do that on almost 100 drives?
Re:Bunches of small drives (Score:5, Funny)
Time well wasted, I guess...
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Bunches of small drives (Score:4, Informative)
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdb bs=1M &
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdc bs=1M &
etc., substituting
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Re:Bunches of small drives (Score:5, Informative)
This is always a good idea. Move the swap and the Windows temp to this drive and keep it formatted FAT32 (or lower). If you can, partition the disk up and give it two 2 gig partitions. Each partition should be formatted FAT16 (aka: FAT, no 32). FAT32 and FAT16 need to read/write to the disk less for each transaction than NTFS and is much faster for it. Since it's just swap and temp files, you don't need NTFS.
If you do this, you leave the rest of the drive open for users' personal files or whatever. The two partition setup should be one for swapfiles, the other for temp files. You can get more creative and create another for a web browser cache, but as you create partitions the drive head has to move farther to span the space and slows down the operation. A large FAT32 partition works well if you dig deep and move a lot off onto this second drive. Another thing to keep in mind is what people are going to be putting into their temp directory. Video work might create files bigger than the partition. In this case, create a 2 gig swap partition at FAT16 and leave the rest FAT32 for normal files.
I always get a second drive now for this reason. Helps in both Windows and Linux. For even better results, keep the drives on different IDE channels. Just think, the overall strategy is to keep one disk working on program data and the other working on the memory swap data - a major bottleneck, especially at IDE speeds.
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NTFS is not significantly slower than FAT, and in fact can be faster due to improved caching and resistance to fragmentation. Sure, sometimes more data need to be written to the disk than with FAT, but in practice it just gets cached until the disk is free to write it without interrupting anything else.
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Re:Bunches of small drives (Score:4, Funny)
DoD now specifies to degause or slag drives (Score:5, Informative)
The standards for data sanitization is more stringent now. Anything that is more sensitive than Classified, and leaves the control of the organization disposing of the drives, needs to be either put through a degauser, chopped up into tiny pieces, or turned into slag. If the media is simply going to be re-used with-in the organization then wiping is okay.
Re:Bunches of small drives (Score:5, Informative)
We experimented with that at the shop. Your typical degaussing ring doesn't generally have the field strength to wipe 'em. Heck...in our test, after zero-writing 'em, and checking 'em after 5, 10, 30, and 60 seconds of D-ring exposure we didn't appear to lose a bit.
Note: dedicated hard drive degaussers can get really expensive, too... It's MUCH cheaper to stick with software methodology. Have a look here [oss-spectrum.org] for details on both methods...
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Re:Bunches of small drives (Score:5, Interesting)
Careful with the magnets (Score:5, Informative)
Just keep in mind these are *STRONG* magnets. When you take it apart the magnets may smash into each other. This could send particles flying away in a direction that, according to Murphy, is where your eyes are. I know this by experience, lucky for me I wear glasses. And if some of your flesh is between the magnets, it's painful.
Re:Careful with the magnets (Score:5, Interesting)
I wish we would've had some nice hardcore magnets when that project came up!
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I took apart a old 1GB hard disk (practically less than worthless these days) just to get the magnet out. It now holds my cell phone case closed (the weak magnets that we
Re:Careful with the magnets (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Bunches of small drives (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.fieldlines.com/story/2006/2/9/13128/15117 [fieldlines.com]
http://www.fieldlines.com/story/2006/10/8/112046/572 [fieldlines.com]
http://www.fieldlines.com/story/2005/9/24/152446/359 [fieldlines.com]
How to remove Hard Drive magnets from their mounting plate
http://www.fieldlines.com/story/2006/10/4/181345/402 [fieldlines.com]
Recycling parts from Hard drives
http://www.fieldlines.com/story/2006/11/9/01948/0162 [fieldlines.com]
Re:Bunches of small drives (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree that it's not worth trying to build a hundred-obsolete-drive array, but I strongly disagree with turning them into garbage prematurely. Sell or give away on ebay/craigslist/freecycle/whatever instead. There are lots of people who can make good use of a few end-of-life-but-still-working medium capacity drives. Just make sure you erase them thoroughly first. Realistically 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda' is plenty; to be absolutely sure give them one pass with a fast random number generator first.
If you want magnets you can take them from failed drives.
Re:Bunches of small drives (Score:5, Insightful)
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You can have friends come over, and starting with 100 harddrives, just take one down, pass it around, and before too long you'll have 99 harddrives on the wall.
Why does this sound familiar? Hmm...
Re:Bunches of small drives (Score:4, Insightful)
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The drives alone will consume close to 1000W. It's probably another 1000W for the equipment to run them, plus whatever the hardware costs are. When you add in A/C costs, thats going to come to around $8-10/day, and depending on the average drive size, you're going to end up with less than 10TB of redundant data.
Now the alternative is 12x1TB RAID6. It will consume around 250W, and cost around $4000. That's around two years before before the power budget catches up assuming you already have all the nece
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RAID controllers with 12 or 16 channels are dirt cheap on eBay now. Jeantech make some really cheap cases with good cooling and room for 12-16 drives. That would make an excellent NAS, if not for you for a charity or user group, and you have an endless supply of redundant drives to keep it going.
Just because a drive is old, does not mean it is unreliable. Drives do not age much when not in u
Re:Bunches of small drives (Score:5, Interesting)
-1 on the power requirements.
Get yourself a nice RAID-box to hook'em into and use the thing for backup. Hard disks have a pretty good life span when they're powered down. And their power requirements are zero in that case. Bring it up once a year and run your favorite disk-scan over the array and power it back down. Cheaper than tape backup.
hard diskus throw (Score:5, Funny)
Play dominos (Score:5, Interesting)
AUction them off (Score:5, Insightful)
There really just a waste of company space and time.
Free Geek (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It's quite easy for computer recycling charities to get working computers, but because of data security policies at a lot of companies they are not allowed to recycle hard-drives. This means that a disproportionate number of computers to hard-drives float around until they're finally scrapped (which overall costs the charity more time, effort and money).
For example, I have a 9gb and a 26gb drive in my main development machine - wit
Seriously? power requirements are high to scale. (Score:5, Insightful)
Something a little more worthwhile... (Score:5, Interesting)
Im sure you could donate the hard drives to them and get a tax writeoff...or
find something similar in your community
Earn a little extra on the side (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Earn a little extra on the side (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Earn a little extra on the side (Score:4, Informative)
freeNAS (Score:5, Interesting)
works great, dont bother with IDE drive size versus Motherboard/Bios as freenas does not use the bios.
I have made a couple of 2TB arrays from less than a couple hundred bucks and a bunch of free 250gb hard drives.
You can do a software raid5 which gives you some peace of mind.
Give them away (Score:4, Interesting)
Unpopular choice: (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, all slashdotters would say either build an array or donate. In reality, the company should keep the biggest for desktop usage and shred the rest.
Safer for you and the company in terms of liability.
Not technically legal, but (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not technically legal, but (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not technically legal, but (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not technically legal, but (Score:5, Funny)
That magnet prank will fail (Score:3, Insightful)
It seems to me, intuitively, that this will not work due to the ferromagnetism of the fender, which is presumably metal. That very property which
Here's a thought... (Score:3, Funny)
A hundred old hard drives stood up on a wall!
A hundred old drives on a wall!
BANG!
Ninety-nine old hard drives....
How About Just a Dozen? (Score:5, Informative)
At first I just got a dozen SATA/EIDE USB slaves for $10 each, and plugged them all into a USB hub, with just the single USB cable stretching out of the case over to another full PC's USB socket. But that is so slow, especially when copying big music or video files between drives (and through the single USB cable to the CPU and back). Playing multiple media files to different terminals in my house is too much bandwidth for the single USB, too. Running 4 USB from the big enclosure to the 4 sockets in the server PC isn't much better, because it all goes through the same CPU and PCI bus.
So I got 3 Sabrent SBT-SRD4 [google.com] 4xSATA controller PCI cards, because they were $25 each. But when I tried to boot them in a few different motherboards (pre-HP Compaq P3/1.2GHz, IBM P4/3.2GHz), none of them got past the POST to even start booting the OS. I want to use them with Linux, but with the failure to even boot I'm not hopeful about driver support, either.
I bought them from CompUSA (still alive, online only), which hasn't replied to (email only - no phone available) tech support requests. Nor has Sabrent itself. I'm not hopeful that they'll refund my money, since everything else about this transaction has sucked.
So what I want to know is what cheap motherboard (no need for graphics or anything else other than at least 3 PCI slots and 100Mb-1Gb ethernet) will work with these SATA cards? If they're really duds, what is the cheapest way to get 12 SATA drives controlled, even if they're not that fast, over to 100Mb/Gb ethernet? Either SATA cards + motherboard, or even a fat mobo with a dozen SATA ports. I'd even settle for just 4-8 SATA ports to get started. I'm talking under $200 if possible.
Ideas? If it works, then 8-9 of them should support the 100 HDs the original question was asking about.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
There is huge potential... (Score:5, Funny)
Rail Gun (Score:3, Insightful)
You won't get any hard drive space out of it... (Score:5, Interesting)
Send me a few 300gigs (Score:3)
Data recovery services (Score:5, Informative)
Apparently, a lot of failed hard drives are not bad because of their physical platters, but because of the drive logic. These places need old drives for replacement controllers that you probably can't buy from the manufacturer.
ft
Setup 1 machine and USB/Firewire them (Score:3, Interesting)
or use the larger ones as customer throwaways - when the video needs to go to the customer and its really big - ship them a cheap usb/firewire enclosure with a disc in it loaded with their video - if it doesn't come back then you've got more to spare....
Probably not worthwhile (Score:5, Interesting)
By the time you're done connecting all of these, and powering them, and cooling them, and dodging the broken ones, and finding a good use for it, and controllers to run them all, I can't imagine you'll be saving many dollars for storage, if any. Not to mention your time -- although it would be fun to spend.
So in the end, you'll have all of the benefits of a massive raid solution, but it'll be expensive to build, expensive to run, and take up a rediculous amount of world space (the real storage requirement).
I don't think they can compete as functioning hard drives. I think you should use them for some other purpose -- like art, or coasters, or to hold up your table.
For example, I have about 500 issues of national geographic from the 80's. They even have those file volume collection thingies so ten get held tegother as a set. I have some rediculous number like 50 sets. These things are totally useless to me -- unlike my nintendo power issues from the '80s that my mother sold about fifteen years ago -- so I got a piece of nice glass, and now have a coffee table that sits on these magazines instead of on legs. It's a nice piece of furniture from which you can reach in a pull out a blast from the past as you sip that coffee.
Be practical -- screw the smaller drives. (Score:5, Insightful)
Either your 10-20 drive pilot project will be a raging success, and your boss will be beating down your door to get the other drives plugged in, or it'll prove to be a huge waste of time, in which case you'll be glad you didn't bother with the smaller drives.
Laptop Backup Drives (Score:3, Interesting)
These sizes are still useful for putting in external USB enclosures and using as a laptop backup drive (with something like Ghost).
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These sizes are still useful for putting in external USB enclosures and using as a laptop backup drive (with something like Ghost).
Ghost is useless nowadays, when symantec bought norton, they screwed it up. Remember to take an very old version :)
How they screwed up?
A) You can't even easily do full drive images with it anymore
B) Where's the DOS based tools?
C) Even recovering from it's "backup" is a doomed failure without installed OS + Ghost.
Ghost is a ghost of itself from back when it was usefull.
Turn them into speakers (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fp4jQNa_9sY&feature=related [youtube.com]
Donate? (Score:5, Informative)
A lot of our donated computers don't come with hard drives, so we're always in need of hard drives more than just about anything else.
We wipe all drives to DoD standards before ever putting them in anything, too. (Well, anything other than the machines we use to wipe 'em.)
If you don't want to ship them all the way to Eugene, there's lots of other charities that do the same kind of thing, and probably have the same disproportionate computer to hard drive donation ratio.
Screw Ebay (Score:3, Insightful)
A lot of corporations are afraid that their systems contain priveledged info but since yours had large chunks of decompressed video, most of which has liscencing attached and has been released, you are in a unique position to provide HDs.
500 GB Hd's cost $100 buy 4, donate the smaller drives, and save the recyclers thounsands of dollars.
-D
Ummm in a word.... no (Score:5, Informative)
1. Call a recycler and dump the drives. smaller than 200GB (keep the largest ones to give out to other employees for their home systems)
2. Buy 2 or 3 1TB HDD's
3. Install them in a box.
4. Done.
Start with the shear cost the additional equipment, then add in the cost of the electricity to run the drives and their controller. then add in the cost of HVAC to keep the room they are in cool. Will by far exceed the cost of 2 or 3 1TB drives. Not to mention the cost of your time to build, deploy and maintain.
In short. Nothing you can do with these drives will save your employer money. However proper recycling might bring in a buck or two. Not to mention the good will when you hand the largest drives to fellow employees to use at home.
About $1000/year energy alone to operate (Score:5, Interesting)
You said 100 drives ranging 20-300GB... that doesn't tell us much about the total capacity, but let's say it's 10TB. A terabyte disk costs less than $200 these days, a 4-port SATA PCI card can be had for $40, so with two of those and the 2 SATA ports on any cheap mobo you have a system that'll serve up your 10TB for $2000, two years of just the energy cost of your 100 disc system.
And that's not counting the headache of building your 100 disk array, the maintenance cost, and the reduced capacity due to inevitable failures with such a large number of older discs.
In short, although a cool project in theory, in practice it's not worth it today. A few years ago it would have been, but the price of storage has just dropped too steeply in the last couple of years.
I work with a group that "recycles" old machines in a developing country to provide access to young people who couldn't afford it otherwise, and even here, with free (donated) hardware it's hard to beat the falling price/performance curve of computer hardware these days. Although we could use your discs... discs (and memory) are shortest in supply. If you want to donate them to us, drop me a line.
Hard drives? We need hard drives! (Score:5, Insightful)
We refurbish computers and put them in the homes of low-income people, nonprofits, churches, senior centers, etc. We always need drives, and late-model computers to keep our refurbishers busy. We are a nonprofit and feel that this is an important way to bridge the digital divide.
I don't know where you're located, but we would love to have those drives, and will wipe them to Mil-spec and reuse them. that keeps them out of landfills (good for the environment) and puts good computers into the homes and tech centers of low-income communities (good for our communities and your kharma). We'll pay shipping if you would like to donate them to us.
Check us out on the web at www.ReliaTech.org. and give me a call at 510 236-7000 to discuss donating those drives and/or computers.
By the way, that donation gives you a tax deduction, too.
thanks!
Ben
what else do you have available? (Score:3, Insightful)
1) Don't expect to use the smaller drives - turn the platters into coasters!
1) (a) If some of them are 7200rpm drives (or raptors), you could roll them out to individual workstations as swap space
2) Get all the 3.5" enclosures out of the old cases, attach together, put into some sort of sturdy frame. Voila, lots of 3.5" drive space. Find a motherboard which has 2 IDE connectors and as many PCI slots as you can find. And get stuffing them with IDE controllers. Now, you need a motherboard with a pci-express slot as well, and either onboard graphics or onboard gigabit LAN. Try for the former as onboard network adapters are notoriously flakey. You then get a PCI-express dual, or quad, channel network adapter.
With 4 PCI slots and the onboard controllers, you now have 10 IDE controllers = 20 drives (+1 new SATA drive for the system to run on). Pick the 20 best drives and fit those to your shiny drive rack. (If you don't fancy that, buy a new case, though I can't find any that will fit more than 18 drives (a Lian-Li), don't forget to get internal enclosures to fit extra drives in 5.25" bays). You'll also need to get a beefy power supply.
3) Do some totting up an realize that the whole scheme has cost substantially more than buying a bunch of new drives.
A few of the bigger drives may be good for medium storage requirements; see if you can buy your employer out of them if you want to build a MythTV box at home; but other than that, I'd say that you've saved yourself a turkey. Which is the basic rule of thumb when saving any consumer-grade hardware
firewire (Score:4, Informative)
Keep in mind this will be noticeably slower than native ide once you get more than a certain number of drives on a single bus, but for some applications, fast disk access isn't as important.
Technically speaking, you can use USB for this too, however there are many more downsides.
Many times slower than firewire, due to the method usb uses to communicate bidirectionally.
Its not that much cheaper, and also you cant use nearly as many drives per bus.
As an example, try http://www.fwdepot.com/ [fwdepot.com]
Their prices are a bit high i admit, but you can build a shopping list there and look around for best price.
4 BUS firewire cards. Note that a 4 -port- card is not at all the same. That will be one bus, with a 4 port hub built in. The less drives on each bus, and the more buses you have, the more bandwidth is available to each disk, and the speed up is exponential.
One bridge board per hard drive, a few hubs and some cabling, and spread them out over your few spare pcs.
Then run something like http://evms.sf.net/ [sf.net] to cluster the machines together and create one giant pool of storage space out of all the drives over all the machines.
It's probably as cheap as possible for getting use out of them storage wise. Any other 'better' solution will cost a lot more too.
Of course, useful for storage and just plain useful are two different metrics.
A lot of others already mentioned donating them.
Just remember to hook 4 up at a time to a spare pc and run a good HD wipe app like http://dban.sf.net/ [sf.net]
But there are many options to get rid of them to others with.
Charity donations for a tax write off, local community projects in need of hardware, friends, family, stocking stuffer for the staff, make a craigslist post and offer them for free (or next to), buyer comes to get it or pays shipping, do the ebay dance, etc etc
Get a few discarded PSUs too, and... (Score:3, Funny)
1 kW may not be enough to keep you warm during winter, but it may help you survive if every other heat source fails.
An Idea? (Score:4, Interesting)
Something like this.
http://www.novica.com/itemdetail/index.cfm?pid=121771 [novica.com]
The platters of could serve as the white squares maybe?
Get a real backup solution (Score:4, Informative)
Re:100 ata hard drives? forget going green (Score:5, Funny)
power_to_run_100_hard_drives = 100 * power_to_run_1_hard_drive
Re:100 ata hard drives? forget going green (Score:5, Informative)
500-800W to run 100 HDDs. Some PCs use that much alone. Even these days, it's still worth using older HDDs, because the cost of replacing them with bigger and more energy efficient ones is still not low enough to cover the cost of running an older drive for a few years. Especially if your NAS supports power saving.
Re:100 ata hard drives? forget going green (Score:5, Insightful)
You need the fans, you need an extra controller card for every 4 of them, the mainboards, etc.
Re:magnets (how to keep them?) (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not worth the trouble (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Not worth the trouble (Score:4, Informative)
Enterprise drives are definitely more expensive, but in this case, one gets what they pay for -- a lot more speed (especially with large, random seeks), and decent redundancy. The drives themselves are in the million to 1.4 million hour MTBF range, while consumer level drives, either don't have a rating, or the MTBF is hard to find, so the best guess is 250,000 to 500,000 hours, although some drives do have a million hour MTBF.
The key is to figure out the task at hand, and one's budget, and decide that way. Some tasks, just hooking up drives to the motherboard and using software RAID is more than workable. Other tasks are so time dependent that one has to have full hardware RAID with as many low-capacity spindles as possible to distribute the I/O far and wide. This is why Flash drives are making a good dent in the enterprise RAID market -- they are not perfect, but there is zero time wasted waiting for the head to move, and the right sector to float by.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Not just for the simple software raid and all that, but for the automatic block checksumming, something I would be concerned about with a big pile of really old drives.