The [H]ard Forum 2 Terabyte Club

John G.

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jul 28, 2005
Messages
163
Anyone can run down to staples these days and pick up two 500GB drives, and have themselves a TB for small investment and next to no work. Times have changed, and those who are serious about mass storage systems have more space than ever. The new barrier separating the men from the boys is 2TB.

I don't have any forum authority by which to establish this club, but I mentioned the idea of creating it and no one bit, so here it is. I should hope it will follow the same rules as the 1TB club, but for clarity's sake, here they are again:

Here are the requirements:
  • 2 Terabytes or more of advertised (before formatting) hard drive space.
  • All drives must be in one system.
  • External drives don't count.

Post Format:
RAID Level (if any)
RAID Controller
Quantity and Name of drives in the RAID array

Singles Drives (if any)
Quantity and Name of single drive A
Quantity and Name of single drive B
Quantity and Name of single drive C
etc

Total Amount of Advertised (before formatting) Space


Use QUOTE tags to make the stats stand out from regular posts.
 
Raid Level: N/A
RAID Controller: N/A
Raided Drives: N/A

Single Drives:
1xSeagate Barracuda ES ST3750640A 750GB
1xWestern Digital Caviar RE WD4000YR 400GB
1xSeagate Barracuda ES ST3320620A 320GB
2xWestern Digital Caviar SE WD3200JB 320GB

Total Unformatted Space: 2.11TB

The machine itself is an A64 3000+ w/ 512MB RAM, and onboard everything else. I also have 3x320GB sitting in drawers serving as backup drives, but those don't count. :)
 
How exactly is this more difficult? Buying four 500GB drives is just as trivial as two, in my opinion. Sure, it's twice as expensive, but with 500GB drives at $175, it's not a huge investment ($700) for four. I think Ockie's suggestion of the 10TB club is a better idea. Sure, it's a long way off from filling up, but I think the idea of a big storage club is to see the exceptionally large systems.

Just to put it in perspective, what if I started the 500GB club? Heck, my mother could join that club. 2TB isn't a huge barrier these days.
 
By your logic there's certainly no point to the 1TB club, any more than there would be to your hypothetical 500GB club. But it's still fun. I have a feeling if you make a club with anything greater than 2TB as the entry barrier, you'd pretty much get three people and that's it.

And for the record, four 500GB drives is not as trivial as two. Two is a purchase you make in one trip, pop 'em in your case and you're done. Four is twice the monetary investment, and requires foresight and planning-- four drives (plus an OS drive) is when you need to start worrying about serious storage system concerns, such as power supply output, cable routing, case cooling, serious backup solutions, etc. And, of course, that your case even has more than 4 internal 3.5" bays (most consumer cases, afaik, do not). ;)
 
"External drives don't count"

That seems odd and unfair as most hardcore SCSI RAID arrays of any decent size are external to the system that runs them. My workstation I'm typing this in for example has two RAID arrays defined on a hardware U320 SCSI RAID controller. A 3 drive internal RAID 5 array with 3 36GB drives for my OS, and an external RAID 5 array with 4 146GB drives. I'm actually considering upgrading all the drives to 300GB 15K drives for addition capacity and speed which would also happen to be 2.1TB of storage - before RAID and formatting of course.

I am going to assume that rule means no single external USB drives...
 
2TB unformatted space in my Network Storage Drive

8 x WD 250GB Raid Edition SATA Drives
1 x High Point Rocket Raid 2330 PCI-E 8 port Raid card
Arranged in a Raid 5 array.

Stuck in a Thermaltake Armor series case using the Thermaltake Ice drive chassis.

Also using 2 80GB drives in a Raid 1 for the OS but that doesn't count
 
Raid Level: N/A
RAID Controller: Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8
Raided Drives: N/A

Single Drives:
8x320GB Western Digital Caviar RE (WD3200SD)
1x150GB Western Digital Raptor (WD1500ADFD)
1x160GB Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9(6Y160M0)
2x320GB Western Digital Caviar SE (WD3200JD)

Total Unformatted Space: 3.5 TB
Total Formatted Space: 3.25ish TB
I've been without a functional RAID controller for months now, so the majority of the drives are empty. The controller I listed is on it's way. There is currently NO RAID set up, and probably won't be. All drives are in a SuperMicro CSE-M35T-1B cage or sitting in a 5.25" bay (Dual 320 SEs). It's used to store anime. I currently have about 800GB of it full. Loud as ****, though!
 
disklist01.jpg


fileserver01.jpg


2x120GB
3x160GB
3x200GB
1x250GB
1x300GB
1x500GB
=========
2370 GB total

All drives are just a JBOD for the time being. I'm still sorting all my data into categories and the like. I will probably be upgrading some of my smallest drives with 500GB models towards the end of the year so I'm expecting to hit 3TB soon.
 
mine. this is an old pic when i first got my 3 750giggers.... im tipping the 1tb mark with movies (im making a media center)

Singles Drives (if any)
1 x 250gb Seagate ST3250824A
3 x 750gb Seagate ST3750640A

34ga58p.jpg


2.5terabytes
 
Oo oo, can I join?

All drives on Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 controllers (x2) on a Tyan sSomething dual p3 on debian in some raid5s.

Case is a Supermicro 743T-645 something - the "super quiet" one with a 645W psu and 8 sata hotswap bays. The first 5 disks are in one of those supermicro 5-disk black hotswap enclosures, the 8 320s are in the case's hotswap bays.

1x 320gb WD3200KS (boot disk)
1x 200gb Seagate 7200.7 (uh... it was there?)
3x 300gb Maxtor drives - Raid5

8x 320gb 7200.10's - Raid5

Advertised capacity after raid, before formatting: 3,360gb
Capacity after raid after formatting:
/dev/sda2 9.2G 2.8G 6.0G 33% /
/dev/sda1 89M 35M 49M 42% /boot
/dev/sda5 285G 7.8G 278G 3% /home
/dev/evms/general-array
2.1T 1.1T 975G 54% /mnt/data
/dev/evms/other-array
559G 189G 371G 34% /mnt/more-data

200gb isn't mounted, and will probably be replaced with a 300 eventually.
 
Guess this means I can join this club too:

My home file/media server:

Tyan K8SE
Dual Opteron 246
2GB RAM
Chenbro SR107 with 8 hot-swap drive bays

The disk array consists of:
Areca ARC-1120 controller
8x WD 320GB RAID Edition SATA drives in RAID5

2.1TB or so before formatting, 2.03TB formatted (on Win Server 2K3 R2 64-bit)
 
I don't know how I missed this club. But damn people, lets raise the bar a little bit higher shal we? :D

I'm not going to list all the specs again, my entire work log can be found here




Older picture of the interior, new picture will be coming soon.





Can this thread get a sticky?
 
Guess I'll post here too =).

RAID6
Linux Software RAID
Highpoint RocketRAID 2320 4x PCIe (inserted in 16x slot for full 4x availability)
8x Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB SATA2
1x Western Digital 6.4G IDE (Boot)

Total Space: 2560GB
Total Usable: 1920GB

Average Write: 160MB/sec
Average Read: 260MB/sec



 
Question: does it count as an external drive if the system has no case? :D

The file server I'm working on may end up breaking the 2 TB mark, but I don't feel like spending the cash on a case for it. It'll be 4-6 drives mounted in what used to be an internal drive cage. RAID 5, dual Gb (if I can get any better bandwidth than single), Linux file server :cool:
 
Terabyte:
RAID Level: 5
RAID Controller: Highpoint RocketRaid 2320
8x WD3200JD/SD

1x Samsung 80GB System Drive

Total Amount of Advertised (before formatting) Space: 2640GB
Total Amount after formatting and RAID: 2086GB (2.03TB) + 74GB

Terabyte2:
RAID Level: 5
RAID Controller: Highpoint RocketRaid 2320
8x ST3320620AS

1x Hitachi 80GB System Drive

Total Amount of Advertised (before formatting) Space: 2640GB
Total Amount after formatting and RAID: 2086GB (2.03TB) + 74GB

Specs for both are in my sig, both are runnning FedoraCore5 x64.

Drive usage:
Code:
(05:45:00)[dew@Terabyte ~]#  df -B 1G
Filesystem           1G-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
                            71         5        63   7% /
/dev/sda1                    1         1         1  11% /boot
tmpfs                        1         0         1   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sdb                  2086      1246       841  60% /mnt/terabyte
//10.10.10.20/Terabyte2
                          2086      1688       399  81% /mnt/terabyte2


To be honest, I think Terabyte clubs should be capacity AFTER formatting and RAID. Anyone can spend $600 on 4x 500GB and have a 200GB system drive.

Hell, Terabyte3 will surpass 6TB when I build it later this year.
 
Anyone can spend $600 on 4x 500GB and have a 200GB system drive.

Umm...not really :p

Anyone who has the money can, but most don't.

I know I can use 2 TB. I can't imagine what you would put on the 10 TB total planned between your 3 systems (or did I misread?)
 
It should be usable 2TB. That would mean a minimum of 3 drives in 0 or 4 in 5 when talking 750 GB.
 
I know I can use 2 TB. I can't imagine what you would put on the 10 TB total planned between your 3 systems (or did I misread?)

You didn't misread at all. Terabyte3 will be TV shows, Terabyte2 will be movies, Terabyte will be everything else.

One acronym that will answer all your questions about the space needs: HDTV.
 
Areca 1230 Raid Card
5 500gig Seagate 7200.10 Drives in Raid 5 Array

2 250gig Seagate 7200.9
2 200gig Seagate 7200.9
1 300gig Maxtor Something
Total Space After Formatting: 2.92 tb

Plans are to hopefully add 7 750gig drives onto the card later on depending on price drop after 1tb drive are released.
 
3.09 TB

fileserver_drives.png

x800pro_fileserver.26.jpg

x800pro_fileserver.27.jpg

x800pro_fileserver.29.jpg


Thermaltake Armor
P4 Northwood 3.06
Intel 865GBF mobo
5x512 Kingston Hyper X pc3200
Visiontek X800 Pro
Antec NeoHe 550
Promise SX4000 Lite
Fry's $15 IDE controller (x2)
All Maxtor Diamondmax drives (some almost 3 years old)

(oh and 3 externals 300,300,400 not pictured)
 
All are setup in CentOS 4.x running Linux SRAID5. LVM over RAID5...

Narya :: Infrant ReadyNAS X6 :: 4 x Seagate 500GB
Anduril :: Modded SFF Case :: P3 733Mhz :: 4 Port SI3112 SATA Controller :: 4 x WD 500GB
Narsil :: 4u Rackmount :: AXP 2800+ :: 3 x 4 Port SI3112 SATA Controllers :: 4 x WD 500GB
4 x WD 200GB ::
Will be adding 8 x 500GB to Narsil in Q2 2007.
 
Damn you people ... now I need to add another terabyte to join this club ... :mad:

whats worse being 1TB short or being 90 bloody gig short :(

oh wait this is advertised space :)

4x 300 Gig PATA Seagates (2 x .8 2x .9)
2x250 Gig SATA Seagates (both .8)
2x200 Gig Sata Seagates (both .7)
1x80 Gig Sata Seagate (.7 again)


2180Gig advertised

will post pics tomorrow :) but for now i will leave you with a nice shiny pic of all 13 seagate drives i own (at least the ones that are 80gig or more) http://picasaweb.google.com/Tacticus.v1/FreakingHdds the above plus 1 300 gig sata 1 320 gig sata another 80gig sata drive and 1 160 gig sata drive :) 3040 in total iirc

hoping to change this soon as i am in the process of replacing all the drives (only one real problem with this plan upgrades to play SC come first)
 
6x 320gb Seagate 7200.10 SATA drives RAID5 + 1x hotspare (total 7 drives)
1x 250gb Seagate 7200.9 SATA drive (Data Mirror 1)
1x 200gb Seagate 7200.8 IDE drive (Data Mirror 2)
1x 10gb Seagate 5400 IDE drive (boot)

Total unformatted advertised: 2700Gb
Total RAIDed/Formatted: 1745.62gb

Its kind of sad that theres nearly a whole terabyte that is just gone after formatting, and overheads.
 
DAMN you can put a lot of pr0n in there!!
 
Windows machine:

74GB Raptor
WD5000KS

574GB


Nix box:

WD800JD
4x WD3200SD RAID5 - 960GB
4x WD2500KS RAID5 - 750GB

1790GB


Total: 2364GB
 
Windows machine:

74GB Raptor
WD5000KS

574GB


Nix box:

WD800JD
4x WD3200SD RAID5 - 960GB
4x WD2500KS RAID5 - 750GB

1790GB


Total: 2364GB

You don't qualify, then

Specifically, the rules say "All in one machine"

If your method worked, I'd be in the 120+ TB club.

We have 75 servers in our company, each server has 4 x 400GB drives

The machine I posted my image for is my PERSONAL workstation.
 
You don't qualify, then

Specifically, the rules say "All in one machine"

If your method worked, I'd be in the 120+ TB club.

We have 75 servers in our company, each server has 4 x 400GB drives

The machine I posted my image for is my PERSONAL workstation.

Yup, rules are all in one machine and you own it.
 
cyberdeus-ragdoll said:
Should I start a 10 TB Club thread, then?
Yes.

:}
____




I like how you intentionally misquoted me

When I actually said 3 TB

Should I start a 3 TB Club thread, then?

3tb2.jpg


Yup, rules are all in one machine and you own it.
I own the 3.4TB machine, I own the 75 "1.6TB" servers,but I'm not counting them.
I could start the 100TB club, if I were counting the servers
 
So, if you left tomorrow you could take all that with you?

Yep. I'd be shutting the company down, and pissing off a LOT of clients, but, yes. We have no investors, no board of trustees, are not a Corporation. Technically, we are a partnership, so, I'd have to give half of them to my S.O.

I'd have to fly to KY, AZ, and NY to actually "take the stuff" with me, since 1/3 of them are in each location.
 
How exactly is this more difficult? Buying four 500GB drives is just as trivial as two, in my opinion. Sure, it's twice as expensive, but with 500GB drives at $175, it's not a huge investment ($700) for four. I think Ockie's suggestion of the 10TB club is a better idea. Sure, it's a long way off from filling up, but I think the idea of a big storage club is to see the exceptionally large systems.

Just to put it in perspective, what if I started the 500GB club? Heck, my mother could join that club. 2TB isn't a huge barrier these days.
Excellent point. There is no point in having half a dozen spin offs of my original thread.
Perhaps I should change the requirement from 1TB to a minimum of X number drives in a single system - say 8?
 
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