Spare hard drive solution

[Lounds]

Hi all

 

We're planning on upgrading all our desktops with SSD's, we're just going to leave the old HDD's inside the cases. Is there a way to turn these spare hard drives in the machines into a networked storage solution? Any magic software out there I can install?

 

Thanks

[featured_spectre]

you can make them network drives, but its highly inefficient to do this. Best bet, have a few cases and make a NAS using freenas.

[GeekyPete]

Do you mean like a distributed disk array? What happens when someone swiches off their Computer? Now make a nice hot cup of tea, go somewhere quiet and think about what you've said.

 

If you want to use them, rip them out and do what @nephilim said!

[cpjitservices]

or send me one as I need one for my PC!!

[featured_spectre]

how big do you need?

[cpjitservices]

I am hoping for a drive around the 250 gig mark. The machine I have is an SFF Supermicro.... Pentium 4 775 1GB RAM. Just got it today but the 250gb drive is goosed!! Edited February 4, 2014 by cpjitservices

[featured_spectre]

I will have a look at home. Might have a 1TB laying around.

[featured_spectre]

It will either be 500GB or 1TB...dont remember which.

[cpjitservices]

It will either be 500GB or 1TB...dont remember which.

 

Either would be perfect mate.

 

Cheers

[cpjitservices]

And yes, any drives that we get spare we generally stick them into A spare pc or server and use samba or freenas and use them for storage

[dhicks]

We're planning on upgrading all our desktops with SSD's, we're just going to leave the old HDD's inside the cases. Is there a way to turn these spare hard drives in the machines into a networked storage solution?

 

I looked at creating a similar system at one point for video storage, for classroom editing of video footage. As has been pointed out, having a machine turned off will affect your storage array, so this is best done in one room where you can (hopefully) garuntee that all machines are on. Theoretically, something like Windows DFS might be able to act as a fast, local way to make video footage available accross a network of PCs - each PC would act as a DFS node, and locally cache any files it was asked to fetch. It'd certainly be interesting to try.

[GeekyPete]

I looked at creating a similar system at one point for video storage, for classroom editing of video footage. As has been pointed out, having a machine turned off will affect your storage array, so this is best done in one room where you can (hopefully) garuntee that all machines are on. Theoretically, something like Windows DFS might be able to act as a fast, local way to make video footage available accross a network of PCs - each PC would act as a DFS node, and locally cache any files it was asked to fetch. It'd certainly be interesting to try.

 

Would be really interesting. I am willing be corrected but I'm fairly certain DFS is a server feature only.

 

There are alternatives but I'm really not sure how successful They'd be. Its targeted at servers keeping file stores replicated across WAN rather than local storage where the replication partners are unreliable.

 

I've subscribed to this thread, please let us know how you get on.

Edited February 4, 2014 by GeekyPete

[Lounds]

I did look into FreeNAS. Thanks for the help though guys. All my thinking was that if you have over 200 machines with spare hard drives you could make a shared storage between them similar to torrenting? but hey I'm gonna make a nice hot cup of tea and think about what I've said...

[Arthur]

You could get some ASRock Z87 Extreme11/AC motherboards. Each one has 22 SATA ports.

 

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7524/asrock-launch-z87-extreme11ac-with-22-sata-ports-and-the-h81-pro-btc-for-cryptocurrency-mining

Edited February 5, 2014 by Arthur

[featured_spectre]

Alas no...it comes with the standard 6. You have to buy the expansion cards for it to accomodate a further 18 (6 expansion cards holding 3 a piece)

[Arthur]

Alas no...it comes with the standard 6. You have to buy the expansion cards for it to accommodate a further 18

Huh? All 22 ports are attached to the bottom edge of the motherboard. You can see all of them in the photo.

[featured_spectre]

the specs of the board according to AsROCK is that it only has 6 sata ports...and the article says this...

 

"The first one is going to be one of the wildest designs on the Z87 platform, using an LSI 3008 chip combined with a 3X24R expander to provide sixteen SAS-3/SATA 6 Gbps alongside the six SATA 6 Gbps ports already provided by the chipset, giving 22 total."

[dhicks]

I did look into FreeNAS. Thanks for the help though guys. All my thinking was that if you have over 200 machines with spare hard drives you could make a shared storage between them similar to torrenting?

 

Our ICT teacher has just been asking me about shared / distributed file storage for video editing, so I guess I'm looking at a similar system too. I'm assuming you're on Windows workstations of some kind - you tend to find whole experimental file systems on Linux rather than Windows as it's more the kind of platform for tinkering with stuff like this. You're right, it should be possible to write a massivly distributed file system to work over multiple workstations, but that doesn't mean that anyone has actually written anything that is going to be suitible for our particular needs.

 

I'm guessing 200 machines distributed around a building are going to be too unreliable to act as storage nodes in a traditional RAID-style array - you could, for instance, make each spare harddrive available via iSCSI, then have a central server connect them up. You could try the same thing (individual disks connected via iSCSI to a central controlling server) as a Ceph cluster with a large redundancy figure set (3 or 4, maybe?), although I'm not sure what kind of network traffic that might produce.

 

How does DFS actually work? Am I right in thinking we can set up a number of SMB shares (i.e. one on each workstation), then get a DFS server to join them together into one filespace, but with the actual sotrage being local to each machine?

[Arthur]

the specs of the board according to ASRock is that it only has 6 SATA ports.

I thought it was pretty self-explanatory based on the photo. The six ports on the right are provided by the Intel Z87 chipset and the sixteen SATA/SAS ports on the left are provided by the LSI chip. No PCIe cards required.

 

[featured_spectre]

ok, agreed, no PCIE card required, but it is still an expansion on the board