w00t!

[unixronin]

I am now the owner of a second Sun 711 multipack (6-slot UltraSCSI JBOD disk array) and four spare 336MHz UltraSparc-II processors for my Sun Ultra Enterprise 3000, for the princely sum of $40 shipped ... and $8 of that was PayPal's money.  As soon as I execute my plan to get both 711s inexpensively populated with 36GB disks, we'll have 396GB of RAID5 online on my NFS/Samba server, which should more than satisfy our network-attached-storage needs for the reasonably foreseeable future.

Comments

[sierra-nevada.livejournal.com]

Any bets on whether media eats that up in less than a quarter?

Users expand to fill all available disk space, and consume all available cycles.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm thinking it'll last us at least a few years. It's not like we're downloading pirated movies or anything. The biggest chunk of immediate new usage will probably be a whole load of educational-software CD images so that we don't have to give the kids the physical CDs.

[cymrullewes.livejournal.com]

Heh. But really, what he said. The first things to go on the disks will be the spindle of kid's software so we can archive the cds instead of having to throw away broken cds.

Why is it that most people when you ask them if they have a cd burner they laugh nervously and say yeah, they burn a lot of music and look really surprised when I ask why they aren't using it to back up their data.

[snowtiger61.livejournal.com]

Software RAID5 on Sun Multipacks? Not gonna be pretty from a performance viewpoint. :(

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Well, we'll see how the performance goes. If minbar turns out to be undesirably slow driving them, I have two options for improving the situation: I have an Ultra2 with dual 400MHz CPUs that I could put them on instead, or I have a pair of Mylex DAC960 hardware RAID controllers that I could put in minbar ... but they're not necessarily going to be much faster.

[sunruner.livejournal.com]

Quick question. We've thought of doing this as the boys distroy CD's faster than you can blink. Question is, how do you get the game to see the image as the actual CD? We keep getting errors about inserting the CD to play the games.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

We use VirtualCD 7. There are a relatively small number of games this doesn't fool, but those are generally not the kids' games, and there are generally no-CD hacks available for them, which frankly I have not the least compunction about using. You want to make sure I bought the game and own the physical CD? Fine, look, here's the physical CD I bought. You want me to have that physical CD subject to wear and tear so that I have to buy a new copy when, not if, it inevitably gets damaged or scratched? Shove it up your nose sideways.