xgrr.de – the whole not the half

Okay you might think there was a raid at some strange gang called PSU. You could not be more wrong . I actually fixed my strange RAID problems this weekend by replacing the PSU with a really good one. I chose the Thermal Take Toughpower XT 750. It comes with cable management, a fancy 14cm silent fan and enough power.

The last few days I was desperate to fix my server. A drive was crashed and I ordered new ones to replace the “broken” one but it didn’t work. All new drives were failing too. In my desperation I ended up bugging the RAID vendor but they needed more information during the weekend and that was simply not fast enough for me.

Last friday I decided to replace the crappy old PSU with a fancy new one. And it did good. No more drives failing, due to the nice fan the temperature of the disks kept on falling compared to before. Overall a good result. Finally I can access my precious data again

Short version: Pain in the ass in the beginning. Long version. Areca provides a HTTP proxy and a CLI interface to the the controllers. Unfortunately the Kernel driver which comes with the vanilla Kernel from kernel.org does not include the necessary functions to allow the newest versions of these nice tools to access the controller directly, which is kind of stupid.

However. As my RAID was migrating and I wanted to have the progress (takes some time with 5TB) accessible nicely remote on my browser I searched the Areca FAQ section (which is really good btw) and found an entry which describes the problem and also provides a solution…

Only the version 1.71 of the HTTP interface is capable of connecting to the driver provided by the vanilla Kernel. I actually don’t know if they changed something in the driver in the meantime.

You can find the right version of the HTTP interface on the Durch Areca mirror.

I wrote earlier about it. For Christmas I made myself this sweet present. Look at the picture and be happy with me

A while ago I started extending my server at home to be my primary file server for personal documents, music and software. I started with a Linux LVM of 1.4TB and ended up with less than 150GB of free space last week. Now I want to migrate the storage to something scalable for the future with enough space for the next few years where I can store everything

I found some good tests on the net:

• http://tweakers.net/reviews/557/1/comparison-of-nine-serial-ata-raid-5-adapters-pagina-1.html
• http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/fast-secure,548.html
• http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/pci-express-battles-pci,1176.html

NOTE: The last two references are quite old. I found that the first one conducted by the Dutch site tweakers.net is quite a good and thourough test.

With that in my hand I’m planning to put a Areca Tekram ACR-1220 (it’s the PCIe version of the ARC-1120 used in the benchmarks) into my server and connect five new Western Digital WD10EADS 1TB hard drives. The hard drives are definately not the fastest drives on the market (in my workstation a VelociRaptor does its work) but the big advantage is that this type hard drive is a “green” one which uses less energy in all power states. Thus saves real money. On the other hand the price is quite okay for such a disk.

The controller is able to connect 8 disk via SATA II so there is plenty of possibility to extend the configuration if there is need to (sure I would need to backup 4TB data of the old installation then but I guess when I reach that we have drives which can easily store 2TB…)

I’ll keep you updated on the progress.