Inexpensive ($1000 or less + hard drives) way to build a data center?

Cyrilix

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I was thinking of building a data center which would consist of the following components:

-4x500 GB hard drives
-RAID 5 card
-an enclosure that stores all of these hard drives with ethernet port

The goal is to be able to connect it all to my main computer's ethernet port and be able to carry it around as you'd carry around an SFF system, except it would only have hard drives and the ethernet connection. Is it possible to do this for $1000 or less + applicable hard drive costs? More specifically, is there a product out there that fits this niche?
 
Thanks alot, I hadn't heard about these but the Infrant ReadyNas NV+ looks very interesting.
 
Does it need to be ethernet-based? An external enclosure like this would work, and you could use a raid card inside your main computer to connect to it. This wouldn't be as flexible - you need the computer to access it, sata cables are limited to one meter, etc. - but it's only half of your budget, and it's a nice case.
 
Well, the main thing is I want to be able to connect to all of the hard drives with one cable, so requiring 5 USB cables for all 5 drives is sort of out of the question. I'm not sure how you would go about connecting an internal RAID card to those external drives.
 
That enclosure has a port multiplier in it. So only one eSata cable would go from the PC to the box. You'd have to pick a card that supports port multipliers and has eSata. The only ones I know of are the Silicon Image 3132-based pci express cards. They do raid 5 in software, but I haven't heard any reports about how well they do it.

In short, I'm not saying they're the best solution, just recommending something you might not know about. I wouldn't buy one - but then, I want more than 4 drives :D
 
You said you wanted it to be portable like a SFF. Do you want to be able to carry the data around when you move your PC, or do you want to be able to move the data around by itself and hook it up to other computers? If it will stay with the PC then the setup with eSATA would work great. But if you want to move it around to different computers then ethernet will be convenient, but slower. A good option might be firewire, if your target computers have firewire. It won't be as fast as eSATA, but it won't be too bad either. There are some firewire raid enclosures, not really sure on the price, though.

edit: If you used a SFF computer (easily under $1000), you could do software raid and serve files over ethernet and firewire (works with linux, not sure about windows).
 
I want to be able to carry it around from computer to computer like an external hard drive, so modularity is a good thing. That said, what's the reason why ethernet is slow? I thought gigabit ethernet was supposed to be pretty fast for file transfers.
 
Then you need Ethernet, and if you want full raid 5 functionality, you need a PC. Independent solutions exist, but hardware raid done as a one-off quickly turns into suckage with no hope of fixing. There's no way you'll pry firmware updates out of the grasp of whatever manufacturer built the box, so whatever it comes with is what you're stuck with. Even if next week a new firmware comes out, it's 50/50 you can't use it.

So, what to do? My suggestion is a small mATX case with as many drives as you can accommodate. 3-in-2 and 5-in-3 converters are available to use the 5.25" bays for more hard drives. If you get a case with a handle, you'll be able to carry it more easily. Then add software raid from the OS of your choice (make sure it handles headless boot okay) or a hardware raid card if budget permits.
 
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