Setting up a JBOD drive

Post by **glossy** » Mon Jul 11, 2005 1:22 pm

Hi guys

, requesting a little technical experience here -- I've run out of space on my server for MP3s and movies, so i'm looking into setting up another shitty and dedicated fileserver solely for storing my movies (the current server is also used as a desktop PC, and the network share partition has user files along with music and movies). The idea behind this being, I set this up with a basic operating system and then if I aquire any other random harddrives I can pop them in and reformat them and instantly expand the size of my array.

Resources, suggestions, anything to do with this subject is hugely appreciated, thanks guys.

edit: I was originally thinking along the lines of a RAID 0 array, except since these drives are going to be aquired from anywhere I can get them from, i'm not sure all the drives will be the same size.

Post by **Tormentius** » Mon Jul 11, 2005 3:27 pm

iirc Windows dynamic volumes in a striped configuration (RAID-0) do not need to be the same size in order to be part of the array.

Post by **glossy** » Tue Jul 12, 2005 12:35 pm

but if i had a 100GB, and a 250GB drive and set them up as RAID-0, wouldn't that end up being really silly ? afaik, it would only be able to use 100GB of striped data across the one logical drive, and then maybe another 150GB drive? I'd like more of a setup where I could be very flexible with it, and have everything on the one logical drive and not fuck around with different shares and whatnot.

Post by **Tormentius** » Tue Jul 12, 2005 5:15 pm

glossy wrote:but if i had a 100GB, and a 250GB drive and set them up as RAID-0, wouldn't that end up being really silly ? afaik, it would only be able to use 100GB of striped data across the one logical drive, and then maybe another 150GB drive? I'd like more of a setup where I could be very flexible with it, and have everything on the one logical drive and not fuck around with different shares and whatnot.

Thats what RAID-0 is: working with multiple physical drives as one logical volume. The risk is that if one drive goes then all the data on the stripeset is lost.

I believe you're thinking of RAID-1 (mirroring).

Post by **Foo** » Tue Jul 12, 2005 6:38 pm

I'm curently running JBOD on a highpoint rocketraid controller with 2 disks (40 and 60Gb).

The setup is piss easy. Just add the controller into the PC (PCI Slot) hook the drives up via the supplied IDE cables, then when the PC boots you'll get a blue bios-like screen for the controller just before windows. From there, assign both drives into a JBOD volume and you're ready to go.

Easiest to boot from disks which are not connected to the controller though.

When you get into windows, you need to right-click My Computer, go to manage, then to disk management, and right-click on the unassigned, unpartitioned JBOD disks. There you partition and format them, and you may as well turn on compression + indexing while you're at it.

About hot swapping: I can't find any info on it for JBOD, so I don't think it can be done. Also, you risk data loss with JBOD because there's no backup drives. On the plus side, if you wipe out a single disk it'll just take the data that was on that single disk... you can get the other disks' data back in a straightforward manner. Or so I'm told. I have no idea how to do it but it makes sense.

Post by **glossy** » Thu Jul 28, 2005 3:17 pm

Foo wrote:I'm curently running JBOD on a highpoint rocketraid controller with 2 disks (40 and 60Gb).

The setup is piss easy. Just add the controller into the PC (PCI Slot) hook the drives up via the supplied IDE cables, then when the PC boots you'll get a blue bios-like screen for the controller just before windows. From there, assign both drives into a JBOD volume and you're ready to go.

Easiest to boot from disks which are not connected to the controller though.

When you get into windows, you need to right-click My Computer, go to manage, then to disk management, and right-click on the unassigned, unpartitioned JBOD disks. There you partition and format them, and you may as well turn on compression + indexing while you're at it.

About hot swapping: I can't find any info on it for JBOD, so I don't think it can be done. Also, you risk data loss with JBOD because there's no backup drives. On the plus side, if you wipe out a single disk it'll just take the data that was on that single disk... you can get the other disks' data back in a straightforward manner. Or so I'm told. I have no idea how to do it but it makes sense.

I'm not too worried about redundancy -- on 99% of current HDD setups, if the drive fails, you lose your data. All I want with this setup is the ease of not having to set up several network shares over several drives to use them -- one /PUBDRIVE/ share which is >400GB over a few disks would work just fine

Shame is, I'm more into money troubles now than I was when I started this thread, looks like this one's on the backburner for a while.

Thanks guys for your help

Post by **Underpants?** » Thu Jul 28, 2005 8:35 pm

Foo wrote: About hot swapping: I can't find any info on it for JBOD, so I don't think it can be done..

How's your luck been with jbod, Foo?
From personal experience I hate software raid with a passion of the christ.
The 3Ware Escalade 7506 will do hot swapping JBOD, but still I get all runny in the gut thinking about doing it even with hardware RAID. Let Raid 10 deliver us from evil but hot spares on RAID 5 walk with us under the shadow of the valley of death. Is the speed of hot-swapping JBOD more important than the stability of powering off and a graceful rebuild upon POST? this truly is a question.

Post by **Foo** » Thu Jul 28, 2005 10:15 pm

Underpants? wrote:
Foo wrote: About hot swapping: I can't find any info on it for JBOD, so I don't think it can be done..
How's your luck been with jbod, Foo?
From personal experience I hate software raid with a passion of the christ.
The 3Ware Escalade 7506 will do hot swapping JBOD, but still I get all runny in the gut thinking about doing it even with hardware RAID. Let Raid 10 deliver us from evil but hot spares on RAID 5 walk with us under the shadow of the valley of death. Is the speed of hot-swapping JBOD more important than the stability of powering off and a graceful rebuild upon POST? this truly is a question.

I don't think I've had it for enough time to make an informed judgement.

I bought a highpoint rocketraid 454 card about 3 months ago, then 2 months ago my PC broke (mobo, ram and gcard fried in a house move) and I bought a mobo with 2 or 3 raid controllers already on board (Asus A8N-SLi-Deluxe).

So I now have 3, maybe even 4 different raid controllers to contend with, and a mix of SATA and PATA drives. Nightmare.

However, the raid 0 striped SATA 80Gb drives are doing very well as my system partition, and the 40 + 60 JBOD drive sitting on the highpoint are behaving very well.

As for the hot-swapping and rebuilding... I'm not even sure if a JBOD array will rebuild at all, which is a concern. My guess is that if you lose one disk, you'd have to rebuild the disks as a fresh JBOD array and would lose the data (even though it's perfectly good) on the remaining drives.

Still for now, JBOD is a convenience thing. I slap my P2P files, music and movies onto the drive for convenience, and keep the originals on hard media.

Post by **Underpants?** » Thu Jul 28, 2005 10:29 pm

mfghrrr oh we're talking RAID 0. Being of the old redundancy school I have no experience or helpful advice with this... I'm curious about speed--do you see any hint of the parabled performance drag in disk I/O?

Post by **Foo** » Fri Jul 29, 2005 5:41 pm

My cats breath smells of cat food.

Post by **Underpants?** » Fri Jul 29, 2005 7:31 pm

F-O-O translates from the asian alphabet to A-D-D