Spanning Multiple Drives

[Nutthick]

I've been asked to put together a 4Tb web store to hold quicktime movies. To keep the costs down I was thinking of using several Lacie firewire drives. Does anyone know how Apache deals with links to drives/directories outside it's own. Is there a way to do this?

 

[ericbrunson]

If you RAID the drives and make them look like a single volume to the OS, then Apache will have no problems what-so-ever. If you can't aggregate the drives, then you can probably work around it with configs and mounts, but not nearly so elegantly.

 

[Nutthick]

Elegance is not really high on my list. Cost, however, is. I seem to remember reading that you can use windows to mount a local drive as a folder. Is that ringing a bell with anyone?

 

[Castor66]

Yup - win2k can mount a drive as folder. I think it's called using Junction points.

But, if you are using windows then you have about 20 odd drive letters to mount drives under. This can then be virtual directories under your apache system.

I think junction points would be more elegant though.

 

[Castor66]

Oh - another thing, I'm not sure where you are based but you be able to pick up a 4 TB device for not a lot of cash. In the UK you can pick up external devices of 1TB for about USD1000. Also,

http://www.rackservers.com

are doing devices of 12x400GB disks for UKP7,000 now. If you are looking for cheap storage then SATA is the way to go now. I did see an ATA-133 SAN device but I can't remember how big it was.

Less power cords is a good thing!

 

[Nutthick]

I thought SATA still had the limitation that you could only have a maximum of 4 drives. Don't know where I heard that, it sounds really strange to limit it to something so small. Is that right, or can you just keep daisy chaining drives together?

Castor66 - I'm based in the UK, and I think you've been looking at the same external drives as me. 4Tb for £2K sounds good. It's just this joining the FW drives togther in a RAID fashion.

 

[Castor66]

January edition of PC Pro has a review of rackservers.com RX3M-3200D-5T. Tha ATA SAN device was a NEXSAN ATABEAST (42 x 250GB ATA/100!!!!)

I do like the LACIE bigger Disk Extreme for 618.99 from Dabs!