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Homemade 16TB NAS - BlackDwarf

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Re: Homemade 16TB NAS - BlackDwarf

#31

Post by slug »

sdfx wrote: post #2

The Video of him building the machine is really worth watching: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BatakM9iAik

The video is quite amazing, but I think he made several crucial mistakes: never drill, file or arc solder anything with tiny and sensitive electronic parts around! A bit of metal in one of the PCBs is enough to ruin the day.

The other thing I noticed is that he used the welder without full protection in both hands: the arc gives out UV, besides the hot metal flying around, which is dangerous.

A funny thing is the construction/design as it goes along, I do that sometimes myself, without designing it first with a CAD.

Re: Homemade 16TB NAS - BlackDwarf

#32

Post by chronomex »

pielud wrote: post #14
sandGorgon wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Next time do try ZFS on Fuse (linux userspace filesystem) - I have a 1TB setup and it works quite well. You could try making a RAIDZ volume and see how it goes.

Have you had good luck with this? I'm running zfs on an open solaris server, but I hate solaris and would like to switch to linux. I never got the impression that zfs on fuse was stable enough to trust with all of my data.

I put my homedir under zfs-fuse for a while. When I migrated to jfs-on-raid5 (3x160G) some months later, a small but nontrivial fraction of my symlinks had turned into 0-length files with 0000 permissions. Various things sort of randomly broke, which was interesting. (Mostly unimportant things, such as ssh not being able to read authorized_keys.)

Re: Homemade 16TB NAS - BlackDwarf

#34

Post by lsc »

lutorm wrote: post #24
invisible wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Always use black HDDs for servers man (if using WD)!

Why not use the Raid Edition drives if you're at it? Supposedly better mtbf, longer warranty, and the to-me-unquantifiably-better TLER feature.

TLER is well worth the 50% premium, in many cases. With desktop firmware, my experience has been that fully half the time when a disk fails, it doesn't properly fail, it retries forever. Linux MD and 3ware hardware raid (the only hardware raid I tried) both hang up waiting for the drive to fail. (the 3ware keeps resetting the drive... but it will sit there and suck for two days just like md)

Back when I used desktop drives, I had several outages caused by a bad disk in a mirror. I log into the box and manually fail it out of the raid and we are good, but customers tend to get mad when their I/O hangs for hours on end.

It only takes one hung mirror in production, for me at least, to pay for a whole lot of 'enterprise' firmware drives.

Re: Homemade 16TB NAS - BlackDwarf

#35

Post by Kadin »

lutorm wrote: post #23

Nice job, though I shudder to think about the vibration noise made by 8 hard-mounted drives in an aluminum enclosure... I'd be surprised if it didn't sound like a mouse stuck in a coke can full of nuts (the threaded, metal kind, that is... ;-)

I wondered about that also. I was a little surprised to see that he didn't (appear to) put in any sort of shock mounts or buffers between the side plates and the drives themselves.

He seems to know what he's doing, though, so perhaps it was a purposeful tradeoff in order to use the sides as heat sinks? By mounting the drives without shockmounts, you can transfer heat directly from the drives to the enclosure chassis. In terms of preventing drive failure that might be more important than vibration reduction.

Re: Homemade 16TB NAS - BlackDwarf

#36

Post by Kadin »

StarLite wrote: post #19
sandGorgon wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Next time do try ZFS on Fuse (linux userspace filesystem) - I have a 1TB setup and it works quite well. You could try making a RAIDZ volume and see how it goes.

The problem wasn't really the filesystem I think. The card actualyl threw the disks out of the array and then refused to put them back in somehow.

Were you doing the RAID using the card's drivers (BIOS softraid/fakeraid), or using regular software RAID?

It seems odd that the controller would drop drives like that, but I would never trust the "RAID" features of low-end interface cards ... they're barely competent at exposing the drives as bare block devices to the OS as it is.

I've had decent enough luck with the real hardware-RAID cards from Dell, but they are expensive and if I were building a new server today, given the price of CPU cores, I'm not sure it would be at all worth the cost and SPOF risk. I've never had a card fail but if it did, that would suck. Back in the SCSI/PentiumII era they were fairly nice though -- I have a PERC still running in a closet, doing RAID5 across 5 74GB SCSIs. Probably about time to pull the plug on it though ... those five drives probably burn through their replacement cost in electricity every few months.

Re: Homemade 16TB NAS - BlackDwarf

#37

Post by barrkel »

pielud wrote: post #14
sandGorgon wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Next time do try ZFS on Fuse (linux userspace filesystem) - I have a 1TB setup and it works quite well. You could try making a RAIDZ volume and see how it goes.

Have you had good luck with this? I'm running zfs on an open solaris server, but I hate solaris and would like to switch to linux. I never got the impression that zfs on fuse was stable enough to trust with all of my data.

I use Nexenta (my ZFS build is described here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=794640 and here: http://blog.barrkel.com/2009/03/zfssolaris-as-nas.html). The nice thing about Nexenta is that it's an Debian/Ubuntu-style userland (the default install is console only I think, but that's the way I like it).

Re: Homemade 16TB NAS - BlackDwarf

#39

Post by chunkbot »

slug wrote: post #31
sdfx wrote: post #2

The Video of him building the machine is really worth watching: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BatakM9iAik

The video is quite amazing, but I think he made several crucial mistakes: never drill, file or arc solder anything with tiny and sensitive electronic parts around! A bit of metal in one of the PCBs is enough to ruin the day. The other thing I noticed is that he used the welder without full protection in both hands: the arc gives out UV, besides the hot metal flying around, which is dangerous. A funny thing is the con…

"never drill, file or arc solder anything with tiny and sensitive electronic parts around!"

He used dead drives during the construction, so this isn't a big deal.

Re: Homemade 16TB NAS - BlackDwarf

#40

Post by dalore »

StarLite wrote: post #19
sandGorgon wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Next time do try ZFS on Fuse (linux userspace filesystem) - I have a 1TB setup and it works quite well. You could try making a RAIDZ volume and see how it goes.

The problem wasn't really the filesystem I think. The card actualyl threw the disks out of the array and then refused to put them back in somehow.

You should look at using software RAID. The performance is not as bad as it once was. Plus you don't get a corrupt controller which tend to be proprietary.
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