November 14, 2007

The absolutely wonderful thing about being a Christian and a blogger (I shun the term “Christian blogger” for all its baggage), especially one who, in a former life, was known for being wildly controversial on a whim, is that I can occasionally trot out the “old me” and stir up the dry bones of controversies past. Because most people think this is what Fundamentalists do for recreation, it is not considered strange at all, and people even look forward to the day a “Christian blogger” does so just for the sheer pleasure of ripping open old wounds and giving it another go-round.

This, however, is not one of those posts.

And yes, I intentionally drew you in with the title.

:p

I’m actually talking about my new Network Attached Storage server. And before I begin, you, dear reader, may NOT ask what I need with close to two terabytes of disk space. If you’ve ripped as many CDs as I have you wouldn’t need to ask in the first place. Network Attached Storage devices are 1.) devices that 2.) store data and are 3.) attached to a 4.) network. Still with me? Actually NAS isn’t all that new. It was originally conceived (in it’s current form) in 1972 and later updated in…no, wait, wrong NAS. (I love controversy!) NAS devices can be anything from a rack of hard drives to a portable flash drive plugged into a network. My NAS is cool because of two things: 1.) the sheer storage capacity - 1 TB; and 2.) the RAID.

RAID 5 was my method of choice. For a home user, RAID is becoming more and more affordable. Consider that in 2002 I paid $200 for a 20gb hard drive - $10/gb. In 2007 I paid $110 for 500gb - $0.22/gb. Put simply, in five years hard drive costs per gigabyte have dropped a staggering 97.8%. So I thought, why not buy three? So buy I did - three identical Western Digital 500gb ATA133 drives. Add a beefy power supply (rated up to 600 watts - my lights actually dim when I turn it on) and I threw $350 at Newegg and another $15 at the IT department at school for a basic klunker of a bare-bones (K6-400, 256mb ram, CD, floppy, and case). Total cost: under $400.

The way RAID 5 works, this formula tells you how much space you end up with once everything’s said and done: total capacity = smallest drive capacity * (total drives - 1). Plugging and chugging means that my three 500gb drives turned into 1000gb (~1tb) of storage. It’s actually something like 900gb once the formatting happens, but I’ll live with it, because I end up with 400 or so gigs free on the hard drives I’m dumping onto the RAID. I’m using FreeNAS for the OS, booting from a CD and storing configuration on a floppy.

Now, IMPORTANT LESSON LEARNED is: don’t skimp. Yes, it’ll run on a 400 MHz processor with 256mb ram. I was getting write speeds in the neighborhood of 1mb/sec, though, which is painfully slow when you want to copy a few hundred gigabytes. At one point it was reading nine days to finish copying. So despite the fact that it worked, I realized I had a spare Athlon 2800+, motherboard, and 1.5gb ram sitting around from my computer upgrade a few months back, so I did a transplant and fired the server back up. Write speeds now run around 8mb/sec, which is still a little slow but far more desirable than 1.1mb/sec. Front-side bus speeds helped, processor definitely helped (after all, it’s gotta calculate that parity bit and keep the onboard controller happy while data is moving around) and memory apparently helped somehow because idle it’s using more ram than was previously installed.

The only real downside here is that my case is a little cramped, so it’s a bit toasty in there. I’m leaving it open, and that seems to help a little. Also it reacts badly to network interruptions - if I lose connection to my router (DHCP server) I’ve got to reboot FreeNAS before I can connect again. This is all offset by the fact that my data is a little safer than it was sitting on one drive.

This is not to say that backups are going the way of the dino. Still always back up your critical data. The draw of RAID 5 is that I can lose a disk and, rather than losing all 500gb of information on that disk, I can slap another 500gb drive in there, and when I get up in the morning all my data’s back to normal. I wouldn’t want to run a business on this setup, but it beats the daylights out of burning 50 DVDs every so often.

I have to laugh, because when I started college only seven years ago, my 6gb drive was fine to run Windows 2000, Office XP, and Winamp. I played CDs on a separate CD player (!) and had plenty of room to store all my homework for a year, plus cool pictures, funny sound clips, etc., all with only one or two trips down the hall to the only guy with a CD burner to make backups of important stuff. I mean, let’s talk MP3 file sizes. In 2000, it took me about 30 minutes to rip a regular audio CD to 128kbps MP3, which came in at about 1mb of MP3 for every minute of audio. Now I can rip the same CD at that bitrate in under five minutes. But I don’t - I rip it at five times the bitrate, five times the size, and it still only takes 10 minutes. What about video? The usual compressed format for 45 minutes of TV-quality video fit at 80mb. This was optimal for a number of reasons. Not only could most computers not play anything bigger without skipping, but 1/3 of a regular season could fit on a standard 650mb or 700mb CD. Not too long down the road, the same amount of data would come packaged in 350mb instead, because home computers could now play it. Now, they’re mostly 700mb each, and still they play fine on consumer computers. DVDs? Since DVD ripping software (for backup purposes) became popular, the format went from 700mb to 1.4gb (today) and 4.4gb (high-end today). Blu-ray ripping will get you around 9gb per DVD. We can do all this with music, video, DVDs, etc., because storage is so stinkin cheap these days. You can afford to throw 10gb into a backup copy of Stealth (though I don’t know why you would) because you have 490 more gigs to spare. And if you run out, just hit Best Buy on the weekend and buy another 500gb to plug into your USB port. Or do a little investment now and get something reasonably extensible that you can store semi-critical stuff on and not worry about losing it. That’s what I did, and I gotta say - I love my NAS.