Online Capacity Expansion (Gone South) with Openfiler and a 3Ware RAID card
February 20, 2007 by Jason · 5 Comments
If you've been reading my blog then you'd know that I use OpenFiler for my home storage needs. When I originally provisioned the system it was with a pretty beefy box. One thing I went short on though was storage. I purchased a high-end RAID card (3Ware 9590SE-16ML) but then proceeded to only install 3 drives (Western Digital RE2 500 GB). I did this for a bunch of reasons, but the most important are that, 1. hard drives cost money and they wern't currently needed, 2. hard drive prices go down, and 3. the raid controller I purchased supports Online Capacity Expansion (OCE).
A few days ago I noticed that my storage array was about 80% full. As such, I decided to order another 500GB RE2 (for $40 less than the original three, proving point #2) and test out 3Ware's OCE.
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Build Your Own Home/SOHO NAS
December 4, 2006 by Jason · 17 Comments
If you're like me, you're probably got more than one computer at home. In fact, if you're like me, you've probably got a half-dozen or so. Wait, that's still not quite right, let me try one more time... If you're like me, you've got a half-dozen computers at home, running a few different operating systems, and you use them all. Yeah, that one's right.
If so, you will, no doubt, have run into the nasty little problem of keeping your files synchronized. If you keep a copy of everything on every machine then that's a huge waste of space. If you don't, you no doubt will need something from a machine that you can't easily access. You've probably thought about setting up a file server but the thought of dishing out $200 (plus hardware) for a copy of Windows isn't really appealing, nor is the thought of taking an old box lying around and installing Linux on it. Luckily, there is a solution that lies half-way in the middle. Its name is OpenFiler.