xgrr.de – the whole not the half

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.

Today I did it. Don’t know why exactly but I’m happy that I did: I bought on of the crazy fast Wester Digital VelociRaptor hard disks with crazy 10k RPMs. I don’t want to talk long about this just see for yourself…