For the past couple years I have been constantly researching for a way
to create an inexpensive backup server that gives at least 1TB in full
RAID 1 redundancy while keeping $/GB as low as possible. I am
targeting this deployment for something that i would use in a home or
small business where the users could help themselves to restoring
files (which backuppc does well) and could assist with offsite
rotations by using additional external USB drives. I have tried
this w/ other low power small form factor machines but in the past i
found that they did not have enough driver support or bus speed to
keep up at an acceptable rate.
Recently, i came across an article on the web where someone created a
$200 pc... Using this article as a starting point I think that i am
getting closer to what i want to do:
<http://paulstamatiou.com/2008/01/25/diy-200-dollar-pc>
Starting with the hardware he suggests in the article, I plan to
substitute his drives for larger drives in a software RAID1
configuration we have:
Intel BLKD201GLY2 Motherboard + CPU - $70
1GB Kingston Value Ram - @20
APEX MI-100 Case w/ power supply - $56 (or any case that holds 2
drives).
Two (2) WD 1TB drives.. WD10EACS -- $240each, $480.
Install your favorite flavor of linux with backuppc (CentOS, Fedora,
Ubuntu, Debian) but install a stripped down version w/o the gui and
the like.
Adding up the $ before tax and shipping yeilds: $626 or roughly
$0.62 / GB in RAID 1 using linux software raid or LVM.
Some other thoughts:
I am aware that this is not going to be the fastest box out there, but
you already know that is not what i am going for.
Possibly add an inexpensive PCI Gigabit Card for faster transfer speeds.
or add a Raid Card to support 5+ drives in a RAID 6 setup to increase
storage to 4TB+ (w/ a bigger case)
Im not a fan of WD hard drives as i have had many fail on me... But
these happened to be the best bang for the buck at the time of writing
this email. I would probably spend a bit more on drives I know that
would last longer.
I am curious if anyone had some ideas , feedback, or has tried to
create something similar. If i try this i will post some info on
my findings in terms of performance and my total experience with
setting this type of system up.
Thanks in advance.
-N
ps: My benchmark is a P2-450 w/ 512MB RAM and 3x500GB SATA drives in
a software RAID 5 config running under debian. Backuppc runs quite
well on this machine and backs up 4 linux servers and 2 windows
servers in less than 8 hours at night. There is probably 3TB of data
total across all the machines, and after compression and pooling it
comes to around 5-600GB). This system has been rock solid and has
been in production for quite some time now. I run rsyncd on the
linux boxes and use SMB for the windows servers. This machine is
only part of my total backup plan. It exists to provide users the
ability to restore files on their own, or if they need to pull an
older revision.
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