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Project: Galaxy 4.0

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yup, A: and B: are reserved for floppy's
ive even had 2 magical floppies appear in my computer even thou i dont have any :/
as for the raid, my vote goes for raid5 :)
 
jpongin said:
GodDAMN look at all those SATA cables!!!

What OS are you running? Can Windows Server even recognize 30 drives?

dsc05239ji5.jpg
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wth!!!!! :eek:
how much storage do you need? and what for?? :confused: ;) :eek:
 
If I'm not mistakin, you can force A and B to map the letters.
 
Dear Mr Ockie,

How come you dont want to use any type of raid? Just wondering so please dont flame me.




:)
 
I haven't checked this thread since I offered to machine the plate for Ockie, and I just wanted to apologize for the hold up.

I'm not exactly a professional machinist - I only work on things like this in my spare time, have never done work for someone other than myself and usually what happens is that I draw something up and hand it to my associate who does most/all of the actual machining, (in his spare time) while I assist. This time, we figured it'd be nice to use MasterCAM to simply import my CAD drawing and turn it into a CNC program for use on an automatic mill. Due to a mass of technical issues that I was not on hand to witness and that I don't have the CAM programming experience to fully understand, (although I suspect it was because my drawing was made in CAD 2000) MasterCAM could not give us the program we needed, so we ended up using a manual mill to make the part, which, looking back on things, was probably the way we should have gone in the first place. Consider that we've only been working on this in our free time after work and the result is gobs of time wasted, for which I offer my apologies.

The part has been completely cut out. I'll be doing a bit of sanding and test fitting tomorrow morning, and then I will ship the bracket such that it should arrive to Ockie on Friday, 12/15, which I hope is some consolation for the delays. In the intervening time, I'll be praying that the outer mounting slots line up with the case, since I am unable to physically test them.

-Nate M
 
Ockie said:
If I'm not mistakin, you can force A and B to map the letters.
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i see no reason you could not. btw, i to would like to know what you do not like about raid?
 
gjvrieze said:
i see no reason you could not. btw, i to would like to know what you do not like about raid?
Click to expand...


I dont want to speak for ockie, but I think that losing storage is what he doesnt like about RAID's.
 
Astrogiblet said:
I dont want to speak for ockie, but I think that losing storage is what he doesnt like about RAID's.
Click to expand...

Read page 1 ;)

He doesn't want raid for the fact it has too much overhead for him.
 
Ockie said:
Yes, that was a last ditch idea if all else fails.


Edit: Thinking about it now, it mountvol might actually come in quite useful when it comes to permissions and keeping things grouped ...hmmm.. I'll play with it.
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just come up with one primary folder on your c drive and mount all the subdrives to that folder as sub folders.. but remember that you can still have them on both a path and a drive letter ..
 
omegatotal said:
just come up with one primary folder on your c drive and mount all the subdrives to that folder as sub folders.. but remember that you can still have them on both a path and a drive letter ..
Click to expand...

The only problem I forsee in this is that you wont know how full your drives are on the fly, also you won't know which drive is acting up if you don't know where the data resides physically. This is why I think I will only do it to a few drives.
 
Update:

The PSU plate has finally been made and shipped out. I expect to see it early monring tomorrow! :)


I will post you guys with pics. The plate was milled out of thicker aluminum (3mm instead of 2mm) so it can hold the psu's up much easier.
 
As far as RAID goes, sometimes you just need to execute 30 read/writes simultaneously.

You could convert, like, and entire season of Harvey Birdman (12-13 episodes) all at once, and still have 4 drives (and 0% CPU) left over for other tasks.
 
I understand that Ockie does not want to be bothered figure out which drive is the failing drive and he is staying away from RAID. But when you do use RAID under these conditions (over 13 drives), it is generally better just to run RAID 6. Only because of so many drives that the chances of losing 2 is higher.

I think RAID is the way to go simply because I try to keep everything organized on my server and I got tired of moving gigs of data around simply because one drive was full and two others were 1/2 full. With RAID, its just how full the whole system is, so no more moving crap around. :p
 
Updates!

Woohoo, the plate finally came!! And man does it look awesome! Nicepants42 was very generous at producing this plate for me, we had a hell of a time getting our templates to match up so I had to read him the dimensions down one by one of the plate... from those dimentions he had to program his cnc machine to craft the plate. The plate has minor imperfections but in my eyes, it's beutiful! Man am I estatic.

Anyways, enough of me blabbling, onto the pics!!! Since this was custom, I asked him to fabricate this part on a 3mm plate instead of the standard 2mm plate... this makes it incredibly stiff.

I think I want to invest in a proper CNC machine now.


Hmmm so sexy.



Thanks for securing the plate and packing it so well... lucky me I didn't realize it would be so heavy when I retrieved my package that I dropped it :) Awesome job Nicepants!


Profile shot of the cutting block and the plate, hmmm 3mm of love.




Anyways, the black thing you see there is the cutting block on which the template is cutout on, it's very heavy and very thick...and whats nice about it it doubles as a shipping backer so the plate doesn't bend in transit.

So yeah, I'm psyched to put this into the machine, it looks as if it's going to fit perfectly.

Nicepants, if you ever feel the urge to go to Michigan, please contact me... I owe you a beer or something.
 
Forget the beer, at this point I'd be happy if you stopped :eek: jinxing yourself :eek: and just installed the damn plate!! :p

Anyway, I hope it fits. That black stuff is cast nylon 6, which is what we usually machine around here during work hours.
 
Great job Nicepants42! I'm sure it wan't that difficult to machine once you own and run a decent CNC machine but most ppl here aren't that lucky. It was mighty tall of you to do him that favor. Although, for the notoriety of being involved in any of the Project Galaxy rigs, I would have done the same thing!
 
Great job nicepants! Ockie, hurry up and install that things so you can figure out how to have 30 separate drives on your system.
 
I don't have the camera with me, however I did go ahead and mount the plate.

Fits like a glove (no, not OJ's glove).


Damn this thing is perfect! She's all running now with everything powered for the first time and it's a great sucess :)
 
Ockie said:
I don't have the camera with me, however I did go ahead and mount the plate.

Fits like a glove (no, not OJ's glove).


Damn this thing is perfect! She's all running now with everything powered for the first time and it's a great sucess :)
Click to expand...

Sweet. Now I can go to sleep.
 
Ockie said:
The only problem I forsee in this is that you wont know how full your drives are on the fly, also you won't know which drive is acting up if you don't know where the data resides physically. This is why I think I will only do it to a few drives.
Click to expand...

thats why microsoft has a disk management tool ;)

and your raid cards/bays can notify you via a flashing light (if supported)

simply start off with only the drive at the left of the top most cage in, thats your o.s. drive, then move from left to right turning on drives, and labeling them in the management tool

they are hot swap bays after all :D

the pluses to doing this is that they are formatted like normal, so you can move the drive to another computer and read it like a normal d: drive...

also dont forget that windows supports dynamic disk arrays, where you can have raid 0/1/jbod which will work on any controller card, even if it doesn't have a raid bios
 
omegatotal said:
the pluses to doing this is that they are formatted like normal, so you can move the drive to another computer and read it like a normal d: drive...

also dont forget that windows supports dynamic disk arrays, where you can have raid 0/1/jbod which will work on any controller card, even if it doesn't have a raid bios
Click to expand...

You cannot just move a raid drive into a non-raid area and still keep the data as you expect (now you can recover data this way, but it is time consuming and relatively hard to do). BTW, Ockie is pretty familiar with raid ;) Check out Galaxy 3.0.
 
protias said:
You cannot just move a raid drive into a non-raid area and still keep the data as you expect (now you can recover data this way, but it is time consuming and relatively hard to do).
Click to expand...

i think that was what he was saying, the benifit of not using a raid is that you can simply remove the drive from the system and it works in any other system.
 
Aku12 said:
i think that was what he was saying, the benifit of not using a raid is that you can simply remove the drive from the system and it works in any other system.
Click to expand...


exactly, works great form server to desktop swaps.
 
Aku12 said:
protias said:
You cannot just move a raid drive into a non-raid area and still keep the data as you expect (now you can recover data this way, but it is time consuming and relatively hard to do). BTW, Ockie is pretty familiar with raid ;) Check out Galaxy 3.0.
Click to expand...
i think that was what he was saying, the benifit of not using a raid is that you can simply remove the drive from the system and it works in any other system.
Click to expand...

yes and no, what i was saying, is that if you configure a software raid using windows' internal dynamic disk/raid support, you CAN move it between different brand raid cards, and even non-raid controllers as long as the disk's are all there, windows should be able to re-activate the raid as it's based in windows, not a hardware device

disadvantages, slower performance and more cpu usage.. specially for multi io's.. but if only used to span disks and be a backup file server. then im sure performance would be ok
 
omegatotal said:
yes and no, what i was saying, is that if you configure a software raid using windows' internal dynamic disk/raid support, you CAN move it between different brand raid cards, and even non-raid controllers as long as the disk's are all there, windows should be able to re-activate the raid as it's based in windows, not a hardware device

disadvantages, slower performance and more cpu usage.. specially for multi io's.. but if only used to span disks and be a backup file server. then im sure performance would be ok
Click to expand...


I'm not a great fan of microsoft or any software solution managing my raid or spanning :)

Anyways, I like it the way it is. Pics coming today.
 
Ockie said:
jpongin said:
GodDAMN look at all those SATA cables!!!

What OS are you running? Can Windows Server even recognize 30 drives?


Most of the sata cables you can't even see :)

Runing Windows Server 2003.


Yes, the drive issue is a road bump, but I'll get around it. You can only have a max of 26 drives in a machine as standalone drives, to get around this I can JBOD a couple of drives or I can use some raid functionality and bind them as one drive letter.

So the drive letters won't be much of an issue as I only need to compensate for 4 drives :) I think most likley that the last 5 drives that goes in will be JBOD.
Click to expand...
You could do that, or you could go and upgrade your disks to dynamic disks, and use NTFS mount points to merge them onto a preexisting drive as subdirectories. I believe even as a dynamic disk; once unmounted, you can remount it on a different computer, and still be able to see all your data.
Click to expand...
 
alcuin said:
Unfortunately, you cannot assign A or B to a hard drive. You can, however, assign A or B to any removable drive, such as a USB thumb drive or memory card reader.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307844
Click to expand...


Well I have drives currently assigned as drive A and B... so puts that theory out the window :)
 
Ockie said:
Well I have drives currently assigned as drive A and B... so puts that theory out the window :)
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Meh. My link and information is valid; under some circumstances and controllers SATA drives show up as removable drives to XP. In those cases you can assign them as A or B if you like then. But the procedure won't necessarily work on all SATA controllers or drives. But if the drive doesn't show up as removable, you can't force A or B on it.
 
Picture updates:

Lights on:


Lights off:



Whats from the top?! A custom PSU plate baby!

dsc05352kd4.jpg




Inside. 3mm made a huge diffrence, doesn't even flex!




 
holy damn.....nice server :D

may i ask, are those Athena Power drives good? Can you remove drives while the computer is on?
Also, since this is a server i suppose, why don't u use the dual nics for better uploading and downloading of files?
 
gjvrieze said:
damn, that looks smokin, btw, how is the noise?
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The hotswap drive units are louder than I hoped for, however once I do a fan swap I should be set. Right now it's moderate noise, basically that of an enthusiast computer. I'd assume about 32dba.

amd rules said:
holy damn.....nice server

may i ask, are those Athena Power drives good? Can you remove drives while the computer is on?
Also, since this is a server i suppose, why don't u use the dual nics for better uploading and downloading of files?
Click to expand...

Thanks :)

Yes, they are awesome. I'm very happy with the choice I made going with them. Yes, they support hotswapping, so I pull drives left and right when it's online and running. The cool thing about these is that you can shut the drive down individually or shut the whole unit and fan down if you don't want to use it and save resources.

Dual nics is cool, but you need equipment that supports it. And right now, thats more than I need :) Now 10gbit on the other hand is something I was looking at, but still sickly expensive in the switch arena.

jmroberts70 said:
[sobb, sobb...] brings a tear to the eye.
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*Throws the man a box of kleenex*

Thanks.

CptFalcon said:
same here, gongratz man!
Click to expand...

Thanks.


As for everything else, I will be doing updates here in the next couple of weeks when I purchase the raid controllers to complete phase 3. So please stay tuned.
 
mmmmm.....yummy bits.

So, Galaxy 10.0 is going to be an entire room full of HDD's then right? ;)
 
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