With more and more people downloading their entertainment, and photo files getting bigger and bigger (especially if you scan them), a massive amount of hard drive space is becoming a necessity for even the least of us. Fortunately it’s also dirt cheap and plentiful. I’ve been adding hard drives, peace-meal over time, expanding my capacity in small increments; just enough to satisfy my immediate needs.
The easiest solution is to add an external drive, with it’s own enclosure, over a USB (hopefully 2.0) or Firewire connection. These are usually single disk drives, using the same hard drive you’ve got inside your computer, but in it’s own box with it’s own power adapter and data connection (usb or firewire). Some of the bigger drives cram two physical disks into the enclosure, and use a built in controller to combine them into one virtual drive (the volume you see on your desktop). These are the one’s that go up to 500gb and up. Until recently, the largest physical hard drives capacity was 500gb, so any external drive that you could buy that was bigger than that combined at least two smaller drives.
These are great for casual needs; lot’s of space, nothing to think about or configure, and portable to boot. The problem with these drives (and all hard drives) is reliability. Every hard drive will crap out, at some point. There’s a saying that there are two types of computer users: Those who have lost data to hardware failure, and those that will. So why’s that worse with these kind of drives? Because there’s TWO (or more) drives in there, DOUBLING (or quadrupling) the chances that a drive will die and take your data with it.
RAID away
The external drives combine themselves using a technology called RAID, a Redundant Array of Independent (or Inexpensive) Disks. To get the biggest capacity possible, a chip in the enclosure combines the two separate drives into one virtual one; two 250gb drives become one 500gb drive, with your data split across them. But because of this “striping”, files are divided across the drives. So if one drive dies, and the other one is just fine, your data is still lost because only half of the file exists on the good drive.
There are other types (or “levels”) of RAID arrays though, that make up for this. The external drives I’ve been talking about use RAID 0, a striped disk array. This gives you the most disk space, but no redundancy. Put two disks together, you get the sum of the parts. RAID 1 though, is a mirrored array, and only gives you half of the combined disk space, but automatically mirrors all of the data from one drive to the other. It’s also much faster to read from (twice as fast), because your computer can be pulling parts of a file from two different drives at the same time. So great, you get the backup but none of the space, cool, but not what I’m looking for.
I won’t get into all the different RAID array types (10+), but the crown jewel is RAID 5. RAID 5 lets you combine 3 or more disks in a huge and automatically redundant volume. You lose about a third (if using 3 drives, a quarter if using 4, etc) of the combined drive capacity to the backup portion of the array, but you get all the benefits of a mirrored RAID 1 array (data redundancy and multiple pipes to read from at the same time), and the combined capacity of RAID 0 (with a little less space, but you can make up for that with more drives). Combine four 250gb drives, and you get around 750gb of usable space. And if one of those four drives dies (and it will, eventually), just replace it with a new one, and the RAID fills it back in with little bits of information it’s been storing in secret on all the other drives. Sweet.
When clicking turns to clanking
So when my largest drive (a 500gb LaCie Bigger Disk Extreme), begin clicking wildly, I started looking at my options for mass data storage. I was sick of all the random small-ish external drives sitting around, sucking up juice and cluttering my desktop, and I was tired of trying to remember what files were on which drive. It was time to go for a very big disk.
There are plenty of off the shelf disk arrays, most suited for offices or networks, with their ethernet and file server capabilities. But they’re expensive, and still somewhat small. A 1TB Buffalo Terastation runs around $800, but in RAID 5, only gives you about 750gb of usable space. Not a significant jump from the 500gb drive it’d be replacing. Jumping up to 2TB (or 1.5TB usable), can run you more than double the cost. There are other cons as well; because it’s a network drive, and not connected over Firewire or SATA (the internal hard drive connection), speed can be an issue and some applications don’t play well with file servers (you have to jump through some hoops to get Aperture to work with it). Of course, there are benefits to having a networked drive, just not for me (I only have one computer that needs to access it).
So my criteria became:
- No network connection
(I want straight Firewire 800 or SATAII so it shows up like any other drive) - RAID 5 capability
(Too much space to back up myself, I want the computer to do it for me) - Cheap
(I know how much hard drives cost, and I ain’t paying a thousand dollars for four $90 drives)
- As big as possible, 1TB+ usable
(I want to have so much space I don’t have to think about it for a long time)
We’re gonna need a montage
So began weeks of pricing, research, confusion, debate, whimpering and boredom. I didn’t know diddly about RAID controllers, and wanted to just buy an external enclosure and the drives, put them together, and have my own Terastation, but cheaper and with a Firewire connection. No dice. Most of the enclosures I found either didn’t support RAID 5, used IDE drives instead of SATA, or were going to require an internal RAID controller card (the enclosure just held the drives, gave them power and ran SATA connections to the card, the RAID goodness was done by the card in the computer). And that’s no fun. If I’m going have a big box of drives next to the computer, it’d at least be nice to be able to move it and connect it to a different computer (like a regular external drive). Not to mention most of these enclosure were butt ugly, not something I’d want soiling my view.
Then I found it, the G5Jive. It’s a simple little metal chassis that holds three drives and sits in the empty space in front of the fans INSIDE my G5. It takes a little bit of reconfiguring the power cables, and you have to remove the optical drive to install it, but once it’s in, it’s perfect. It runs off the power supply already going into the G5, so no big bricks in the wall, and everything is hidden away, inside the computer. Combine that with the extra drive space in the G5 next to the boot drive, and I’ve got 4 empty slots, ready for drives. Plus it was cheaper than any external enclosure I found, with our without the RAID controller. $80. Lovely (obviously this only works for you if you’ve got a G5, but I do, so… Lovely.)
Since it’s just a barebones chassis, it doesn’t come with any kind of RAID controller, so I had to find one of those. There are a ton of variations in SATA RAID controller cards, and I’m still not even sure what all of them are, but the only one I found that seemed to do everything I needed (PCI express capability, RAID 5, 4 internal SATA connections) was a Highpoint RocketRAID 2310. And what do you know, they’re local (Fremont, CA), so warm fuzzies for that. This ran for about $120.
So I’ve got everything I need, sans-hard drives, for $200. Now for the hard drives. This is where I spent most of my time, trying to figure out the best price to capacity ratio. Like I said before 1TB (750gb usable), with four 250gb drives, just didn’t seem like enough of a jump in capacity to warrant all this effort, so I started looking at 320gb drives. I could’ve had the four 250gb drives for $90 a piece (even lower now), or 320gb drives for $120 each. But even with 320gb drives, I was going to end up with about 1TB of actual usable capacity. I wanted more.
The Hamburgler
I actually ordered four 320gb drives online, around the same time I ordered the hard drive chassis and RAID card, but received an email saying they were out of stock, a week later (AFTER I had already received the chassis and card). So now I was getting impulsive, I had everything but the drives. Luckily that day, of all days, Fry’s put out it’s weekly sales ad in the paper, and what do you know, 500gb SATA II drives for $179. But limited to one per customer. I got my buddy Jim, gave him a wad of cash, and we went and sweet talked a wage jockey into letting us each buy two. Hot damn.
So after a few weeks of research and penny pinching pricegrabbing, I managed to put together a 2TB (1.5TB usable) internal RAID 5 SATA II array for less than a thousand bucks. Then rapidly filled it up with all the porn and Modern Marvels episodes I could find.
Pictures of it all
- [All the gear](/albums/g5raid/IMG_6819.jpg)
- [Laid out, ready to assemble](/albums/g5raid/IMG_6824.jpg)
- [The G5 Jive drive chassis](/albums/g5raid/IMG_6826.jpg)
- [Everything plugged in](/albums/g5raid/IMG_6828.jpg)
- [Cleaned up, like nothing happened](/albums/g5raid/IMG_6829.jpg)
- [BigWhipple](/albums/g5raid/getinfo.gif)