Part 3 of building the DAS storage. I repaired the workstation and got the direct attached storage (DAS) connected. 8*4TB SAS drives configured for now as a BTRFS Raid 1 mirror. Gives me 15TB of usable space. I will do a full parts list soon and also revisit this when I have tested it a bit.
Tag: storage
Part 2: Building Direct Attached Storage
Part two of the creation of the 32TB external direct attached storage (DAS) box. I want to keep the costs down, its a bit homemade. Here I just cover the the assembly, as the motherboard in the computer I was intended to connect it to failed on the same day!
Part 1: Building Direct Attached Storage
I have fourteen 4TB SAS drives, 8 of which I am going to use in a homemade 32TB external direct attached storage (DAS) box. I will be using an old case that I have going spare. To connect it up a bunch of cables I found on eBay. This is part one, the cables.
Homemade DAS – Part1
I am building a direct attached storage (DAS) case that I will attach to my workstation using an external SAS card. External RAID DAS cases for SAS drives are not cheap so homemade it is! So far I have been assembling the parts, I have the drives, case, and lots of wires. I will do a more in depth video of the whole process later. You could use this as part of a NAS if you wanted.
OwnCloud – its awesome!
I gave up on SpiderOak in the end, it was too resource heavy for my laptops, their batteries were really struggling. The constant encrypting and decrypting was too much. Its a shame because as a backup system for large amounts of data it was really very good. Especially if that data was on desktops or didn’t change much. I couldn’t justify keeping it for this use only, too expensive at $25 a month (which is about £20 now!). So I looked back into OwnCloud.
I tried OwnCloud a number of years ago as I run my own home server anyway. Back then the desktop sync client was just not up to the job. It would take forever to sort out changes and sync them, often using up entire CPU cores on both the server and the client machines. I am pleased to say that problem as been solved and now OwnCloud is a great choice if you are running your own server somewhere anyway. The sync seems to be fast, and the setup is easy. I am using a self-signed SSL certificate, which doesn’t cause much in the way of annoying warnings. OwnCloud has the other obvious advantage that you can really limit the access to the data, and it supports encryption of the data on the server too. Or you can encrypt the drives etc. I have been using it for about 4 months without problem. The only issue I had was when there was a power cut in my house while I was away. Doh! This killed the server obviously.
The downside of course is that with SpiderOak I had a ‘cloud’ copy of all my important data that was at a different location to my house. This is no longer the case. I don’t use OwnCloud to sync all the large data-sets across my computers, I sync those with Unison instead. So to avoid a catastrophic data loss in the event of disaster I have synced all my important data and docs to my office computer using Unison. This is about 1.7TB of data onto a 5TB raid array. The first sync took ages but as this data doesn’t change very much. I also use Amazon Glacier for data that can be essentially archived off and forgotten about, its super cheap.