Re: [PLUG] Restructuring home network and building a storage server

On Mon, Nov 10, 2014 at 7:27 PM, Rich Freeman <r-plug@thefreemanclan.net> wrote:

On Mon, Nov 10, 2014 at 4:45 PM, David Colon <dcolon@dcolon.org> wrote:
> You can even add hot swap
> SATA bays to a standard PC case with something like this:
>

Virtually any SATA chipset on a PC motherboard supports hot-swap these
days, as long as you're in AHCI mode (which you should be in anyway
with Linux, though you should check your dmesg/etc). The biggest
problem I've had with hot-swapping in a PC case is things like
daisy-chain power cables which make it very difficult to remove drives
physically if they're not in the right position.

I think you missed the point of the comparison I was trying to make. NAS style devices like the Drobo give you the ability to "easily" hot swap a drive in the event of a failure. Yes you can hot swap a drive mounted internally in a PC case but it's generally not going to be as easy. The device that I linked to gives you the flexibility to easily hot swap five drives while only using three 5.25" bays of a standard PC.

Keith:

I looked at the two devices that you linked to. Based on the dimensions of the first one, there's no way it uses a standard ATX power supply. The second unit uses an external brick power supply which would probably be easier to replace in the event of a failure.

My personal file server is a recycled PC (AMD proc with 4 gigs of RAM) with drives. I've got four 3TB drives in a RAID 5 using software RAID. I have spare disks on hand for when they fail. I've also got a spare power supply for if and when it fails. If I didn't have one, I could run over to Microcenter and pick one up for about $40. This box also runs Plex, Squeezebox server, Zoneminder, and bind9 in a KVM instance. Again this was a recycled PC so my only cost when I decided to do the project was for the drives. Adding MythTV to this box to schedule recordings from an HDHomerun is next on my todo list.

The intent of my original post was to chime in with some personal experience. Hardware fails at the most inopportune and inconvenient times.

David