Louwrentius

This is my NAS storage server based on Debian Linux. It uses software RAID and 20 one terrabyte hard drives. It provides a total usable storage capacity of 18 terrabytes in a single RAID 6 array.

One of the remarkable side effects of using 20 drives within a single array is the read performance of over one gigabyte per second.

I have experienced problems using a HighPoint RocketRaid 2320 and 2340 when they are using 'staggered spinup' in combination with Samsung Spinpoint F1, 1 (one) terrabyte disks.

The problem is that the F1 disks spinup very slowly and often seem to 'hang' while making ticking noises that will scare any computer user to death. When, after ages, you have the luck that no disks keeps hanging during startup, the first thing to do is to disable staggered spinup.

However, if staggered spinup is not used and all disks will spinup together, please note that you will need a strong PSU to handle the short peak load. For example, starting up 20 (twenty) disks will briefly generate a load of 550 Watt on my APC ups, according to its display.

I estimate that during startup, each disk is roughly consuming 20 Watt. Take this all into account when deciding which type of disks and controllers you will be using.

Case: Norco RPC-4020

Mobo: Asus P5Q-EM DO ( 6x sata)

CPU: Core 2 Duo E7400

RAM: 4 GB

Controller; HighPoint RocketRAID 2314 (16x poorten)

PSU: CooMas Silent Pro M 600W ATX2 (definitely not overkill)

HD: Samsung 1 TB SAT2 HD103UJ (10x)

OS: Debian Lenny with custom kernel (backported)

FS: EXT4

RAID config: 10 disk RAID 6 based on Linux software RAID.

Performance: Read: 850 MB/s Write: 300 MB/s

Capacity: 7,5 GiB or 8 GB.

I am very pleased with the result. Points that should be improved are the temperature and noise. The PSU is a major overkill since this puppy draws less than 200 watt.

Bunny:~# ./show-hdd-temp.sh

Device Temperature

/dev/sda 32

/dev/sdb 34

/dev/sdc 33

/dev/sdd 36

/dev/sde 34

/dev/sdf 33

/dev/sdg 38

/dev/sdh 39

/dev/sdi 37

/dev/sdj 36

/dev/sdk 35

Personalities : [raid6] [raid5] [raid4]

md0 : active raid6 sdj[10] sdb[0] sdl[9] sdk[8] sdg[7] sdf[6] sdi[5] sdh[4] sde[3] sdd2 sdc1

7813463552 blocks super 0.91 level 6, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [11/11] [UUUUUUUUUUU]

[======>..............] reshape = 30.1% (294904524/976682944) finish=585.3min speed=19413K/sec