We’ve seen it all before:

hay guyz, check this out, I got a bunch of old 64mb thumb drives and made a RAID out of them! now i can put all my pr0n on there roffle lolololll

RAIDed floppies? It’s been done. RAIDed tapes? Yo dawg, that’s an enterprise storage solution! Let’s talk seriously now.

I have a fileserver that my family uses, it’s just a box with a couple pairs of hard drives in it (RAID-1, thank you very much. None of this starving-student crap with an oddball assortment of drives in RAID-0). Given that the box is used exclusively for serving up SMB shares, the OS installation is tiny.

I could’ve gone with something really stripped down and optimised, but that would require effort; sysadmins are allergic to unnecessary effort. Instead I just installed Ubuntu jaunty via netinst. Laugh all you want, but I have better things to do, like sleep.

Close-up of chikage's OS drives

The old system was whining about missing one half of its RAID-1, so I decided to splurge on a pair of 4gb USB flash disk – the princely sum of $22 for the pair. I setup the md software raid volumes ahead of time, which were happily picked up by the ubuntu installer – 512MiB /boot partition and the rest handed off for LVM to manage.

I could bore you with a bunch of details, but who cares about that.

• Does it work? Yes, albeit a bit slower during bootup – total boot time from power-button to login prompt is 90 seconds.
• Does the RAID work? Nicely, thank you. You can yank a drive out and it’ll keep ticking along.
• Is there enough capacity? Plenty, the OS filesystem is 44% full.
• Won’t swapping kill it? Yes, maybe eventually. The system has 1GiB of RAM, more than enough when you consider it’s only really using about 100MiB. At least there’s a chance both drives won’t fail at exactly the same time, so I can replace one.
• Am I taking backups? Of course! If it toasts itself it’s not big deal.

What next? Hmm, if I splash out I could buy another pair of flash disks and kick it up to RAID-10 for a performance boost!

Tags: flash, md, raid, thumbdrive, usb

This entry was posted by Barney Desmond on Tuesday, September 29th, 2009 at 3:22 pm and is filed under FTW. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.