There comes a time in every computer engineer’s life when they must analyze their storage solutions and admit that they are, in fact, no longer sufficient for the stuff they wish to store. In fact, this time usually comes about every 18 months for me.
I decided that this would simply not do. My last file server, now over 18 months old, had 600GB of raw storage in a 400GB three-drive linux LVM2 software RAID 5 array. I had added an extra 200GB of “non redundant scratch storage”, but it still wasn’t cutting it. I was also concerned that I had heard from several people that RAID 5 redundancy is not as good as one might like to think. Because the array can only stand a single drive failure without data loss, often times a single drive fails, a replacement is obtained, but then the stress of rebuilding the replaced drive causes one of the others to fail, dooming the entire array.
On a whim, I decided to see what it would take to slap together a fileserver with a little bit better longevity. I decided to get a rackable case, as my “tower of towers” is getting pretty ugly even though it is in a dedicated “machine room”. Some day I’ll actually buy a rack to put it in (but not today). I decided that for performance and reliability, I wanted to build an 8-disk RAID6 array. I figured I’d spec it out with 8 cheap drives, and cheaper hardware, and another with 8 huge drives and slightly nicer hardware. I ended up choosing the bigger and better one (naturally).
In the end, my file server would run me just under $2300. It included:
- 1xChassis Supermicro (CSE-833T-R760) 3U chassis with 8 hot-swap SATA bays and 760W Triple-Redundant power supply
- 8×1TB Seagate ST31000340AS Drives (32MB cache 7200RPM SATAII 3Gbps)
- 2×2GB Corsair DDR2 1066Mhz (PC8500) ram
- 1x Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 Wolfdale 2.53GHz
- 1x ASUS P5Q ATX Motherboard LGA 775 (has 8 on-board SATA II ports)
With a RAID6 array, I would have 6TB of usable space – that’s a lot of por…erm…”Anime”. Once the parts had all arrived, I excitedly started slapping it together. In the end, I forgot a video card (whoops, thought I had one, but it didn’t work anymore), so that was another $30. I tried a serial console install first but that didn’t go to well. Next I finally got the bios to boot the Debian netinst CD – SUCCESS! Or…maybe not. During the install, I got this error:
No common CD-ROM drive was detected. I did some research, but I couldn’t figure out a solution. It appeared to be a problem with the debian installer.
I finally came to the real answer. This motherboard uses a Marvell 88SE6121 controller (I believe it is a PATA controller only). The bios was able to read the CD to boot, but then the debian installer couldn’t find it, because the module we need (pata_marvell) isn’t available in the 2.6.18 kernel on the Debian netinst CD (or wasn’t built into it by default). I had to build a custom install CD with an updated kernel in order to get this baby up and running! =(
Details on how exactly I got the CD built will be coming up soon. Also, maybe I’ll post the ISO. For now, I gotta get some shuteye. Chow!