2.5 terrabytes arrives

Out of drive space! ... ever since starting at Granger 2 years ago I've always had to deal with this problem again and again ... the file server is full.

6 months after I started I put in a beefy new fileserver with 400GB raid5 for user files ... more than doubling the prior capacity. Within a year it was full. Again, I had to send out all staff emails asking people to remove or burn non-critical files. Nope, we don't have space quotas in place...but we've certainly thought about it. The fileserver holds all the users profiles, users "my documents", a dept only shared space, and a public space that all users (including volunteers) have access to. Presently we're at 20GB free. I'm certain someone will download some images from a camera soon and we'll be empty again...then another email will go out...and the cycle repeats.

There are 2 empty drive bays in the server, but they're SCSI ... can you say CHA-CHING!? And with only 2 slots the best we could do is a raid1 mirror ... so we'd have to get 2 identical drives and only get the capacity of one of the drives. A good 146GB SCSI drive is about $300. So we're looking at $600 to only gain 146GB of space...uggh. It gets worse if you want more...a 300GB SCSI is $1000 which means $2000 to gain 300GB of redundant space...that just makes me sick considering the price of SATA drives.

Ed and I have been kicking this problem around for about a year now. The solution we landed on back in December was to build our own fileserver...get a Chenbro server chassis that can hold 12 hot swap drives...get a 3Ware 6 port SATA controller card...get a server grade Intel motherboard...2GHz CPU...2GB ram...and 4 300GB SATA drives (raid5). Total cost at that time was $3000 and we'd have a fileserver with 900GB space (with raid5 you loose 1 drive for parity)...that could easily and inexpensively scale up to 12 drives holding approx 3TB.

We never moved forward on that project for several reasons, but during our recent review of our disaster recovery strategy the topic surfaced again we decided to actually take some steps to get more space...and quickly, easily, and inexpensively as we could.
So we determined to keep critical files on the current fileserver which is a beefy PowerEdge2600 with all sorts of redundancy...and onsite same day 4 hour support should it have a critical problem. This means user profiles and "my docs" stay...all other files go giving about 200GB of free space.

A dedicated fileserver doesn't have to be fancy if it's not hosting critical data. So we're going to use an old Dell Precision box (dual P3, 1GB ram) that's served as a test "server" for diff projects...slap a fresh install of server2003 on it...slap in a 4port SATA controller...slap in 4 SATA drives (raid5)...change the login script to point certain mappings to the new box and a few things in Active Directory...and hopefully have plenty of space until Feb when new budget $$ is available.
So last week we got a few new goodies...
(8) Western Digital 320GB SATA drives from www.zipzoomfly.com for $141 each or $1128 for 2.5TB!!!
(2) 3Ware 4 port SATA controller cards from CDW.com for $336 each.

So 4 drives and 1 controller card = $900 Which will give us a 900GB file"server"

The unknown is whether the power supply can run 5 hard drives...1 IDE drive for the OS...and 4 SATA drives for files. The controller card has a sweet feature which sequences the spin up of each drive so they're not all starting up together causing a HUGE current draw. Worse case we'll have to pop for a beefy PS. Stay tuned...

Dell is putting SATA drives into some of their lower end server models. Once the new high capacity 10,000rpm SATA drives come out in a few months I'm predicting people will dump SCSI for SATA...the price difference is staggering and prelim reports show the SATA drives on par performance wise. Which means hopefully server prices will come down nicely price wise.