[TriLUG] Music Files (and a small rant)

[paul]

I have 16,511 unique mp3s primarily organized into full-albums, loose,
and live/single_track. I keep them all on an externally attached scsi
raid array (raid 5) and manage/stream them locally for my wife and I
with Jinzora. Check out http://www.jinzora.org.

If you are not in the market for scsi raid, then I would have to look
first to a box built with a 3ware SATA 8000 series "Escalade" raid
card and 4 or 5 400gb disks. Raid 5 with a hot spare in a 5 drive
config would give you 1.2tb usable space plus the hot spare. These
cards are "true" raid as opposed to the "fakeraid" provided by most
other ATA/SATA raid cards out there. Check out
http://www.3ware.com/products/serial_ata8000.asp for this model. I
have no experience with the 9000 cards though I hear they are good as
well, though more pricey. This is a good reference for ATA/SATA raid
http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html.

The only thing I have seen weird with SATA raid is in external arrays.
IDE can take a lot longer in terms of error correction than SCSI and
the HBA will not wait long before marking the drive bad (even though
it is not). I have to manage 8 16-drive arrays like this and haven't
lost any data, though be sure that if your HBA marks 2 drives bad
simultaneously you could be in for a 16+ hour rebuild on the array.
Needless to say, for critical data, these arrays are not the final
destination for that data.

Hope that helps you some.