When I built this system two years ago I decided to span a volume across multiple large hard drives with LVM to get the storage capacity I wanted. I would also keep backups of everything I had so if even one drive went bad and lost everything, I could restore from backups.
That decision’s been haunting me ever since. Sure I’ve got backups, but it’d take a while to get everything back the way it was…
So I’ve decided to rebuild the storage system using a collection of RAID 1 (mirrored) drives LVM’d together into a single volume. This should be better than RAID 5 in that the chances of a second read error on multiple massive 2GB drives when rebuilding is too great. With RAID 1, the chances of a successful recovery of a drive failure go up, of course, at the cost of more drives. I’ll continue to maintain backups though…
Oh yeah, what’s really driving this is one of my drives is indeed failing and I don’t have a good way of recovering.
So, the Antec 650 has six cooled, hard drive bays. I need a bunch more to maintain the current five drives, and add a bunch of new ones while I rebuild the storage system. So I started with the Cooler Master 4-in-3 Device Module STB-3T4-E3-GP. For $20 from Newegg it’s perfect. It uses three 5.25″ bays in the Antec Titan 650 and provides four 3.5″ cooled hard drive bays. Perfect.
Cooler Master Device Module Hard Drive Chassis Box
Cooler Master Device Module Hard Drive Chassis Packaging
Cooler Master Device Module Hard Drive Chassis Right Side
Cooler Master Device Module Hard Drive Chassis Parts
Cooler Master Device Module Hard Drive Chassis Fan
Cooler Master Device Module Hard Drive Chassis Front
Cooler Master Device Module Hard Drive Chassis With Drives
My motherboard only supported six SATA drives so I had to cheaply add four more SATA Ports. The Rosewill 4 Channel PCIe to SATA II Controller. I think it does some kind of RAID, but I’m just using it for the ports and let md and LVM in Linux to the Raid.
Rosewill 4 Channel PCIe to SATA II Box
Rosewill 4 Channel PCIe to SATA II Packing
Rosewill 4 Channel PCIe to SATA II Card
Everything went in perfectly.
Empty 5.25 Drive Bays in Antec Titan 650
Cooler Master Device Module Hard Drive Chassis Installed In Antec 650
The first two Seagate Barracuda LP ST32000542AS 2TB 5900 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5″ drives have been in the system for a week running badblocks. Two Western Digital Caviar Green WD20EARS 2TB SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5″ Internal Hard drives will be here next week. I’ll run bad blocks on them, then start rebuilding the storage system. The first configuration will be these four 2GB drives in RAID 0 for 4GB of storage and as I migrate data off the old drives I’ll add another four 1.5 GB drives in the same configuration.
