Hah! Last laugh is mine to be had!

[feren]

So in a previous entry of the "Inkblot Chronicles" I was lamenting how the five 18 gigabyte disk drives I had purchased for my MultiPack were too large to fit into the enclosure, since the drives were 1.6" tall and the enclosure was only meant to handle 1" height disks. I fretted at length that I had just wasted $250 by not checking the physical specifications and then speculated that I would have to turn around and sell them off in order to recoup my losses.

I found a "better" way, although it's only "better" if you apply a significant amount of masculine reasoning to the solution.

To save myself from wasting those $250 dollars I went ahead and spent another $200 to purchase a used D1000 StorEdge array from a company with one for sale on eBay. The D1000's specs call for 1.6" height disks, and in fact even go so far as to specify the part number of the drives I currently have in hand if the user is looking to install 18gb drives. As an added bonus the array I'm buying comes with six 9.1 gigabyte hard drives that are 1" tall, so I can transplant those into my MultiPack array and have even more storage. Mmm, 40 gigabytes in one array, and 90 gigabytes in the other. Yeah, I know you scoff at it (so many people have 100 gigabytes or more on a single IDE drive for their PC these days it's not even funny) but keep in mind these arrays are running RAID level 5, with hot spares, and SCSI-2 drives. My performance is better and more redundant than yours! Oh yeah, these disks are hot-swappable to boot.

So to sum it up: by spending an additional $200 (not counting the shipping and handling) I have just "saved" myself $250.

Bizarre, isn't it?

Walking all the way home from commuter trains

Comments

[youngvanwinkle.livejournal.com]

Dude, I'd much rather have a new RAID 5 40gig array than another 100gig drive. I need somewhere to back up my full mp3 collection safely (though I might accomplish this later with a two-disk RAID 1 array =oP ).

[feren.livejournal.com]

Wakko has, after countless debates on #watertower, finally sold me on IDE RAID via products from 3ware. I've been reading up on their Escalade controllers for parallel ATA and I think I've found a solution I'm happy with for the MP3 server I'm building in the apartment come November. I'm planning it out right now as a RAID-5 with 8 disks, all of them 7200 RPM IDE 120gig Western Digitals with the 8mb cache on-board.

RAID becomes a surprisingly affordable solution when you use IDE, and to me affordable is the way to fly right now.

[youngvanwinkle.livejournal.com]

Dude, if you're gonna be going 8-disk, I'd recommend getting SATA drives. They're not that much more ($20 more per disk, which means another $100, but you're talking about spending $1000 on a controller and drives already so it's not that much more) and the cabling is a lot easier, and that way you're already future-proof in that if you decide later to upgrade to 8 300GB drives when they're cheap, you're good to go by just swapping out the old drives for the new ones.

[feren.livejournal.com]

Additionally I find it amusing that most of us geeks are looking to get RAID to protect, of all things, our MP3 collections. I mean, who cares about the expensive sofware we've got laying around, or all those financial records we labored to enter into Quicken. It's the music that matters, man! *grin*

[youngvanwinkle.livejournal.com]

It's harder to replace a collection of 20,000 individual mp3s than it is to replace copies of Photoshop and Director. Now, Quicken records would also be good to backup, but that should fit on a CD or a Zip drive or a floppy or a USB keychain drive or something.

An mp3 collection is probably the hardest-to-replace thing a geek would have that'd require that kind of storage space. I've been accruing mp3s for years; some of them I doubt I could find additional copies of.