Increase Server Storage Capacity

[darren5972]

Hi,

I look after the IT at a Primary School this year we have almost used all the space on the server. IIRC its an old IBM server (x series 206) with RAID 1 and a capacity of 70GB. I think C:\ is ~20 GB with 5 GB free and D:\ ~50GB with 1GB free. I don't think there is much money available and a new server isn't financially viable at this point. Ideally I'd like to add the storage internally on the server but if there are good arguments for Storage Servers, NAS and Ext HDD then I could be pursuaded.

I was think of just adding a IDE 500GB HDD inside the server and making sure it was backed up properly but obviously this doesn't have the protection that comes with being part of a RAID array.

Does anyone have any thoughts?

Many Thanks

[AIT]

Hi,

I look after the IT at a Primary School this year we have almost used all the space on the server. IIRC its an old IBM server (x series 206) with RAID 1 and a capacity of 70GB. I think C:\ is ~20 GB with 5 GB free and D:\ ~50GB with 1GB free. I don't think there is much money available and a new server isn't financially viable at this point. Ideally I'd like to add the storage internally on the server but if there are good arguments for Storage Servers, NAS and Ext HDD then I could be pursuaded.

I was think of just adding a IDE 500GB HDD inside the server and making sure it was backed up properly but obviously this doesn't have the protection that comes with being part of a RAID array.

Does anyone have any thoughts?

Many Thanks

just add a raid card and have 2 x 1tb mirrored. cost effective and masses of storage.

nas boxes are very good but how would you controll permissions on them properly in this environment (obviously without going to the high end ldap integrated nas boxes)

[dbrown]

I am in a similar situation to Darren and am considering fitting a SATA card & single 500GB drive. I did wonder whether it would be worth fitting 3 drives and a RAID card, but could not find a PCI card which did more than 2 internal drives.
What I'm wondering is, does 2 drive mirroring work? If a disk fails completely, presumably one *might* be able to read from the other. But if one drive corrupts data, how does the controller know which one is right?
When we asked for quotes to replace our existing server (with 3 SCSI drive RAID), no one suggested either SCSI or RAID (including the supplier of our existing server, who presumably recommended it 5 years ago.) I'm beginning to wonder why.

Has anyone here ever recovered data from any RAID array with a faulty drive?

[SYNACK]

The first thing I would do is have a look at how it is setup already, if it already has a RAID controller you may be able to add more disks to it and expand the current array. Unless the server is reasonably new and you need to add a lot more storage cheaply I would be looking at a RAID card and drives as below. You may also need to upgrade your backup system to cope with the extra data as well.

I am in a similar situation to Darren and am considering fitting a SATA card & single 500GB drive. I did wonder whether it would be worth fitting 3 drives and a RAID card, but could not find a PCI card which did more than 2 internal drives.
What I'm wondering is, does 2 drive mirroring work? If a disk fails completely, presumably one *might* be able to read from the other. But if one drive corrupts data, how does the controller know which one is right?
When we asked for quotes to replace our existing server (with 3 SCSI drive RAID), no one suggested either SCSI or RAID (including the supplier of our existing server, who presumably recommended it 5 years ago.) I'm beginning to wonder why.

Has anyone here ever recovered data from any RAID array with a faulty drive?

Yes you want RAID and you are right that RAID1 can have that issue especially with rubbish controllers. The differnece between SAS drives (Serial Attached SCSI) and SATA is speed, reliability and lifespan - SAS wins all of those.

A good RAID controller allows you to keep working when a disk has failed and even rebuild without shutting down the server assuming hot swappable drives. I have done this several times without the system missing a beat. I have mostly used hp SmartArray cards which I have found to be great but there are cheaper options avalible. Ideally you want something with onboard cache.

One of these Internet Product Section would probably work but lacks many of the niceties of more expencive units. That one is PCI, if you have a server with a propper server motherboard then it will have either PCI-X or PCIe both of which give you way more throughput and many more options Promise Technology, Inc. - Internet Product Section

There are other brands to look into promise were just the first cheaper brand I thought of but if you can afford better I would highly recommend it. LSI and Adaptec are others to consider or if it is a brand name server look into their offerings.

For the OP a RAID card and a couple of (or prefferably 3) 1-2TB drives would probably work out well.

[darren5972]

Thanks everyone

[hotwired007]

the solution i had was to build a NAS box and find an opensource SAN program to dump on top - nexentastor works - although i'll admit all i use it for is to host my VM images. BUT it does have built in support to pull all your file permissions from AD.