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Data Storage Hardware

Home-brewing a 1.2TB IDE to Firewire Monster 361

Posted by CmdrTaco from the now-thats-a-lotta-pr0n dept.
Delta-9 writes "Here is a writeup on how to combine 6 200GB IDE drives into a small tower and hack together some firewire controllers to give you one giant 1.2TB firewire drive." Very cool project, both technically and aesthetically.
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Home-brewing a 1.2TB IDE to Firewire Monster More

Home-brewing a 1.2TB IDE to Firewire Monster

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  • Right about now.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by gricholson75 ( 563000 ) * on Wednesday September 24, 2003 @05:45PM (#7049078) Homepage
    This guy is wishing he hadn't posted 3 megs worth of pictures.

  • Reminds me (Score:5, Funny)

    by MC68040 ( 462186 ) <henric@digitalLI ... m minus language> on Wednesday September 24, 2003 @05:46PM (#7049089) Homepage
    When I wired up 5 60MB SCSI-25 drives back in the day to get a whooping capacity of 5x60MB...

    And still that amount of data is almost half of one of today's most popular RO mediums.. =)

    But none the less, nice article and with the disk prices these day's it's getting closer within rage for many of the people that spend that much on electronics... I sure do =P

    • Re:Reminds me (Score:4, Funny)

      by ari_j ( 90255 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2003 @10:12PM (#7051292)
      When I wired up 5 60MB SCSI-25 drives back in the day to get a whooping capacity of 5x60MB...

      Holy mathematics, Batman! We're too lazy to multiply 5 and 6, so we'll just post the original numbers a second time. :P

  • Nice (Score:2)

    by Goo.cc ( 687626 ) *
    I've been thinking about something like this but using a standard PC case to house the drives. Still, it wouldn't look as nice as this does.

  • Uhm.. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Karamchand ( 607798 )
    ..actually there are quite cheap external boxes for usual hard drives including a firewire plughole. Cheap, finished - it works out of the box.

    Ok, why get it easy if it can be done complicated as well..
    • Do you have any links?
    • And where can I get a 1.2TB drive to plug into one these boxes if yours?

    • True. Tere is one such four drive / dual chain enclosure:

      http://www.cooldrives.com/qubayredk1st.html

      I've seen an eight drive enclosure too.

      There are brainboards with backing plates that that are specifically intended to replace the SCSI ports on old SCSI enclosures.
      • But why is this thing restricted to Windows and Mac? Is it using some weird driver? I would think it would appear as a firewire storage device, and thus be OS-independent. A bit of searching shows that people are using these with Linux, but I don't know if they're really a good idea yet.
    • It's not so much that it can be done in a complicated way, it's just that figuring out how to build something like that, and then actually doing it, is really most of the fun. Actually using it is somewhat anticlimactic in comparison. (sigh) unfortunately for me my own RAID array is getting rather full, and this article has me thinking. Dammit all to hell.

  • mirror? (Score:3, Funny)

    by exhilaration ( 587191 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2003 @05:47PM (#7049105)
    What brave karma-worthy soul will have the courage to post a mirror?
  • Isn't this just the same thing as the bunches of SCSI drives in a tower back in the day when everyone was in awe of a Gigabyte hard drive?

    If yer gunna homebrew your drive you should put all the platters in the same casing! -anyone can have a bunch of drives

  • Mirror (Score:5, Informative)

    by keesh ( 202812 ) * on Wednesday September 24, 2003 @05:48PM (#7049120) Homepage
    'Fraid it's only a mozilla grab... clicky [firedrop.org.uk]. Images are still uploading, but I got them all...
    • Bah... Is that all you can do? Come on, people, try reloading a few times...

      (Why do I get the impression that my webhost will suddenly introduce bandwidth charges?)

  • nice. (Score:3, Funny)

    by Sonnenschein ( 701061 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2003 @05:49PM (#7049132)
    Just dug up an old receipt just recently for a Seagate 20MB hard drive, 1992.

    Total: $495.24

  • Thank God (Score:5, Funny)

    by stoolpigeon ( 454276 ) <bittercode@gmail> on Wednesday September 24, 2003 @05:50PM (#7049139) Homepage Journal
    he used fire wire and not usb or scsi - or well anything else. this will save us from the hundred or so "Why not firewire?" posts every time somebody discusses some other method of moving data around.

    .

  • /.'ed (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 24, 2003 @05:50PM (#7049140)
    A few years ago while browsing the Halted Anniversary Sale, I came across a 4 bay 5.25" SCSI drive case for something really cheap (I think $35). I can't pass up a deal like this so I snagged it. Well it sat around for a long time, past the point of me giving up on SCSI. I had replaced my 3 36GB SCSI drives with 2 80GB IDE drives and never wanted to go back. So it sat. While performing the SparcStation ITX hack, I discovered that firewire to IDE bridgeboards could be had in the $50 to $80 range. After using one there I started a little thread in the back of my mind about what other nefarious uses I could find for these little gems. Then one day I saw an ad for a full height 5.25" box that held 3 3.5" hard drives. Suddenly inspiration struck me like a bolt of lightning, and in true Dr. Bob fashion, I took it to an extreme.

    The largest drive available at the time I started this hack was the Maxtor 200GB.
    What do you think?

    Here's how I did it:

    1. Start with the empty case.

    2. The original case fans were very noisy. In addition to that, the fan grilles cause lots of turbulence noise. So I cut them all out and replaced them with PanaFlow fluid bearing fans and wire grilles. I had to make custom power cable harnesses for these fans as well

    3. As long as I was replacing noisy fans, I replaced the fans in the drive carriers with think PanaFlow FDB fans. I threw their grilles out altogether as they operate with their doors closed and the grille is, well, pointless.

    4. Next I downloaded the art work for the firewire logo from Apple's web site. I printed out one that would fit and glued it to the boring beige top case. Black indicated material to be removed. First I drilled pilot holes to get the tool bits in. Then I started cutting to remove the big chunks, then I cut closer to the edges with my dremel tool, and finally filed it smooth with my half round bastard (not shown here). Those that know the joke are now snickering.

    5. After this the whole case was sanded and painted with Krylon Fusion Burgundy Red. This paint takes 7 days to fully polymerize so I set it aside and focused on the electronics. I also bought a hunk of clear acrylic from TAP plastics and a 30mm round for the center of the logo.

    6. OK I've got a firewire hub that mounts in the same hole as the old Centronics connector did (firewire depot), and 3 dual drive FireWire to IDE controller cards. Plus I need to supply power and route the cables for data and the LED's. I decided to mount them on the empty panels between the back of the drives and the back panel. First I had to measure the card for the stand off. Never leave home without your trusty calipers.

    7. Now the cards can be mounted on my 3/4" standoffs and 4/40 screws. This project would be impossible without round IDE cables. The powered hub is visible in the lower left of the 1st picture.

    8. This might look like a chaotic mess to you, but it's actually a carefully choreographed symphony of cable. The truth is, it's the only way it would all fit.

    9. This is glue. Strong stuff.

    10. When the front was dry, I hit it with some 3M Imperial Hand Glaze. That made it nice and shiny. Mmmmmm Shiny. (droooool)

    11. Now it's time to get silly. I installed 2 6" and 2 12" tri-color cold cathode lamps. These will really spice up my life. After messing with EL wire, I have decided that it's not bright enough to be worthwhile for almost any use. CCFL lamps however are bright enough to be seen in any lighting conditions including camera flash. EL wire is only visible in low light. CCFL lamps also last longer.

    12. Like EL wire, cold cathodes require a high voltage inverter.

    13. Finally I mounted some LED's in the front connected to the busy signal outputs on the firewire controller cards. I may at a later date remove this metal grill to improve the lighting and airflow.

    All done. Here are some beauty shots:

    Please visit my archive of art work photos for this project. Click on any picture for a very high resolution photo. Some of these really move me.

    Tech Specs:

    Firewire 400 (sustained transfer rate of 35MB/s, max for firewire 400)
    Oxford 911 chipsets
    6 Maxtor 200 gig ATA 133 hard drives
    4 cold cathode lamps with a combined output of 12 watts
    16 LED's
    Powered firewire hub

  • hey guys isn't this an article already here. or maybe he should of waited an hour???? http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/09/23/20 41246&mode=thread&tid=137&tid=188&tid= 198

  • What good will that do you? (Score:5, Funny)

    by psoriac ( 81188 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2003 @05:52PM (#7049160)
    Tell me, Mr. Anderson, what good is a 1.2TB firewire drive if you can't serve any content from it?

  • Forgive my hardware ignorance but... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Kethinov ( 636034 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2003 @05:53PM (#7049180) Homepage Journal
    if you use firewire controllers to give you one giant 1.2TB firewire drive, doesn't that essentially make 6 hard drives pretend to be one? (AKA the OS doesn't realize it's many) And if just ONE of those drives failed, aren't you shit out of luck with your data?

    Again, forgive my hardware ignorance if I'm way off.

    • Re:Forgive my hardware ignorance but... (Score:5, Informative)

      by kasperd ( 592156 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2003 @06:05PM (#7049308) Homepage Journal
      Doesn't sound like ignorance to me. If the six 200 GB drives make up a 1.2TB logical drive, there cannot be any redundancy. Six IDE drives, and no redundancy - I don't hope he have any important data there. Had he at least used RAID-4 or RAID-5 giving him a 1TB logical drive and one redundant disk, he would have a fair chance of keeping his data (assuming the broken disk gets replaced before the next fails).
      • Yeah I suspected that but I didn't want to go making grandiose claims without being sure. Personally, I'd leave them as separate drives and use them for different purposes and/or operating systems. That way if one fails, everything else is independent and you only have to worry about recovering THAT drive's data because it's been modularized.

        Personally I'm not a RAID fan. I operate with three hard drives. One 40gb drive, one 20gb drive, and one 8gb drive. Yeah /. crowd I know that's pretty old school, but
      • Raid-5 would give him 1200*2/3 = 800GB, but as the OS will see the 6 drives the best bet is to use mirroring to get 600GB because the performance of Raid-1 is so good (in Linux).

        - Brian.
      • Redundancy, reschmundancy. This is just very large and very cool, and will likely be used to mass quantities of MP3s and ripped DVDs. I like it.
    • While it isn't mentioned in the writeup, the firewire bridges will not make the drives appear as one. The OS will still see 6 different drives. OS X pretty easily supports software RAID and LVM, so he's almost certainly using one of those methods.

      And yes, if any one of those drives dies, he's SOL, although as somebody else mentioned a RAID 5 would help this situation.
    • Seems to me that it would more than likely write 1/6th of the data to each drive at once. So if one drive failed you would only be 1/6th shit out of luck.

    • Re:Forgive my hardware ignorance but... (Score:5, Informative)

      by JimRay ( 6620 ) <jimray@gma[ ]com ['il.' in gap]> on Wednesday September 24, 2003 @07:04PM (#7049862) Homepage
      It's a little confusing, especially if you're not on an OS X box, but this guy has built a software RAID setup. Essentially, all six disks are acting as one because he's used the OS X Disk Utility to set them up as one.

      The problem with this is that OS X's Disk Utility doesn't support RAID 5 in software, at least not out of the box. So, you either have to stripe the six disks (lots of space, no redundancy) or mirror them (as much space as your smallest drive, full redundancy) . It looks like he went for the striping option, which is how he got over a terabyte. However, as it's been pointed out several times already, this is a bad idea because if one of those disks fails, his data is lost. And I seriously doubt he's backing this "disk" up...

      What he should do (and quite possibly is doing for all I know, it's not detailed) is use something like Raid Toolkit [fwb.com] to create a RAID 5 setup. Since RAID 5 uses both data striping and parity, his data is protected even if a disk gets hosed.

      However, software-based RAID 5, at least in my understanding, isn't exactly a performance champ, so if he's doing a lot of reading and writing to that drive, he's probably better off getting a real RAID controller. However, this would make a killer media backup box.

      The linux based software RAID HOW-TO [tldp.org] is actually pretty informative for a general understanding of software RAID.

      Cheers
    • I believe they show up as 6 individual drives.

  • SATA (Score:3, Interesting)

    by LoudMusic ( 199347 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2003 @05:53PM (#7049183)
    Wouldn't it make more sense to build a SATA RAID array? Using the 3Ware 8 channel SATA controller and a bunch of big ass Maxtor SATA drives you can get more storage for probably less cost and complication.

    • Re:SATA (Score:2)

      by tf23 ( 27474 )
      That's *exactly* what I did - So I'm buildin a fileserver [slashdot.org].

      As a matter of fact, one of the drives just died. I just installed the replacement from Western Digital yesterday.... love that raid5 :)
      • I'd like to put about ten drive in my current case and a new motherboard with 64bit / 66mhz PCI slots to support that fast 3Ware RAID controller. Eight drives in RAID 5 on the 3Ware, and two drives mirrored on another card (to be named) for the system. If the drives in the RAID 5 configuration were 300GB SATA drives I'd have enough space to last me, my family, and my friends about 10 years. Woohoo! Unfortunately that would run me about $8,000 by the end of it because I'd be building from the ground up with

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2003 @05:54PM (#7049190)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Only one thing wrong... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by TheSHAD0W ( 258774 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2003 @06:01PM (#7049254) Homepage
    Firewire is SLOW. You're taking drives capable of bursting 100 or 133 megabytes per second and plugging them into a bus that maxes out at 50, with a practical limit of half that. Also, aren't those little bridges expensive? You might be better off getting a RAID controller and boosting your throughput to 1/2 gigabyte per second or better.

    Of course, Firewire is a lot more convenient. But if you want convenience, why not just buy single-drive externals and stack them? I suppose you may have an old case lying around, but I'd personally find a bunch of drives that were easily separable more useful. If I needed to take the data on one with me, I could just unhook it and bring it along.
    • 1/2 gigabyte per second?

      I'm not aware of any IDE RAID controller that can do that, but I could be wrong.
      The 3ware Escalade 7500 series is some of the best IDE RAID controllers out there and they do burst at max 190MB/s streaming (RAID 5) in read and max 70 MB/s sustained.

  • 6 drives, no redundancy.. Stupid. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Ferrule ( 82308 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2003 @06:01PM (#7049262)
    Ok, so the guy goes to great lengths to build a 6 drive 1.2TB external storage device.

    Doesn't menton how the drives become one.. It's not raid-5 as that would be 5X200MB + 1 parity drive. So it's either striped, or the large volume properties were faked.

    IMO buying 6 drives and not running RAID 5 is really dumb.

    Sure is a purty case though.

  • Not Slashdotted (Score:5, Funny)

    by bobdotorg ( 598873 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2003 @06:02PM (#7049269)
    No no no - it's not slashdotted. He's just running Norton Disk Doctor. Check back in November.
    • or it is the perpetually restarting Micro$haft defrag utility that always ends when the drive is still fragmented and says it is finished. Sort of like a premature ejaculation.

  • Huh? (Score:5, Funny)

    by athakur999 ( 44340 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2003 @06:03PM (#7049285) Journal
    What is this tear-uh-bite that you speak of? I've never heard of such a thing. Please tell us how big this drive is in units of Libraries of Congress or in terms of how high a stack of floppies it would take.

    • What is this tear-uh-bite that you speak of? I've never heard of such a thing.

      European or African... I mean, base 2 or base 10 TB?

      Kjella
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • The stack of floppies would be 2.52 Kilometers (or 1.57 Miles) high. This assumes one double-sided 1.4MB floppy disk is two millimeters think. If we calculate 1.2TB to mean 1,200,000 MB - then the height of our floppy disk stack becomes 2.4 Kilometers or 1.49 Miles high.

      As a Canadian, I am unfamiliar with this "Congress" of which you speak, though im sure she has a very big libraries.

    • Re:Huh? (Score:4, Funny)

      by pavon ( 30274 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2003 @07:04PM (#7049868)
      Or better, how many Libraries of Congress could those 3.5" floppies fill? Well, lets see .... they would fill a room 40ft x 22ft x 10ft. What that's all? And they could only pave half a mile of road. Quite lame.

      However you could stitch together some fine floppy-disk jump-suits for 10 blue whales! Much more impressive.
  • With this much space, I can backup all my vhs head-cleaner tapes to dv format!
  • According to ther site, the guy uses three firewire-to-ide interface cards and a firewire hub. Obviously, from the screenshot, he uses Mac OS X, so I assume has has to be using software RAID... I dont see any mention of a RAID controller or some sort of combinatorial device other than the firewire hub, and that cetainly will not combine drives.

    FYI, Mac OS X includes software RAID by default, it's accessible in Disk Utility, located in /Applications/Utilities

  • Big one (Score:5, Funny)

    by InsaneCreator ( 209742 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2003 @06:12PM (#7049390)
    <Shrek voice>
    Do you think he might be compensating for something, eh?
    </Shrek voice>
  • And now, just how can I hack my TiVo into using this?
  • Step 1 : Buy hard drives
    Step 2 : Buy firewire bridgeboards
    Step 3 : Plug it all in
    Step 4 : Post on slashdot and crash web server

    So he took off the shelf parts and used them in the way they where intended (gasp) what a 1337 hardware hacker.

  • buying drives for an array (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MarcoAtWork ( 28889 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2003 @06:55PM (#7049760)
    I would hope that this person (and anybody else that is thinking about creating an array) is not going to buy all 6-8 drives at the same time from the same supplier.

    More often than not drives built in the same batch tend to fail fairly close to each other, and if more than one fail at the same time you can kiss goodbye to your RAID-5 array (and you were backing up your 1+TB of data, weren't you? after all it takes 'only' about 250 DVDs to do it, doesn't it?)

    I think that ideally you'd want to buy your drives over a 6-8 months period from different suppliers for every drive, while it's definitely messier in terms of warranty etc. the additional protection from 3 drives failing at the same time should be worth the hassle...

    just my 2c

    • Re:buying drives for an array (Score:4, Insightful)

      by pmz ( 462998 ) on Thursday September 25, 2003 @10:51AM (#7054728) Homepage
      I think that ideally you'd want to buy your drives over a 6-8 months period from different suppliers for every drive...

      I respectfully disagree. For a high-availability array, which would you rather have:

      - a set of six matched drives, with the same firmware revision and protocol implementation nuances providing thousands fewer variables when troubleshooting a failing system.

      - six randomly purchased drives with who-knows-what and who-knows-how-they-will-interact providing only the possibility of trial-and-error chance resolutions of problems.

      I think there's a reason why Sun manages the firmware revision of their harddrives as part of their complete software configuration. Sun even provides patch sets to upgrade drives to fix anomolies that come up.

      Yes, there is more than just brand-name behind Sun's high OEM prices (and Sun knows it too...that'll be $600, please).

  • I realize this is somewhat redundant, but how well would this work with RAID5? Since the IDE/firewire converters are three separate physical units, all parity information would have to be processed by the host (PC, or mac in this case).
    Firewire should be fast enough to handle the extra data, but I'm not sure the added overhead (calculating parity data, sending it over firewire) would fare well for performance. Perhaps a solution which handles RAID5 on the target end would be better?

  • Hardly newsworthy (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Fore everyones information, this 'project' is nothing new or special. I will not metion its name, but connected to the better servers of a 'top' P2P application are dozens if not hunreds of people with shares (ie. storage solutions) of comparable and rarely even greater capacity.
    On some servers, they won't even let you in if you have less than a hundred gigabytes of shared 'infomation'...

    2c
  • I tried this last year, but the devices on the same firewire chain got assigned somewhat randomly by the Linux driver so it was very difficult to tell which device corresponded to which physical drive. If you had trouble with one device it was difficult to tell which drive it was.

  • I tried this on Linux with some problems. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Rolman ( 120909 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2003 @08:01PM (#7050369)
    I tried this on Linux and got terrible performance at the first try, I got a 23MB/s RAID-0 when each HDD is capable of 26MB/s by itself (everything according to Bonnie++ and hdparm). I didn't know what to blame, the bus, the cables, the Linux SCSI layer, or the whole IEEE1394 support on Linux. Windows was noticeably faster with up to 28MB/s.

    Then I made some more research and it turned out the problem was caused by the sbp2 kernel module. This module had some good fine-tuning parameters (sbp2_max_sectors, sbp2_max_outstanding_cmds and spb2_max_cmds_per_lun) up to 2.4.20, but these got ditched in 2.4.21 in the name of a "better way of handling these parameters". I understand the logic behind this move, but the tweakable granularity should have been kept.

    Using 2.4.20, I managed to get better performance by tweaking these parameters, then modified sbp2.c on 2.4.22 to reflect the changes. However, I haven't been able to get the 35MB/s this guy got so easily on MacOS X, I'm currently stuck at 29.22MB/s maximum and it's painfully slow to test all combinations of those variable parameters on the sbp2 module.

    I just wish there was some document which could explain more about the relationship between these parameters for people not actually involved on the linux1394 project. The comments on sbp2.c are not helpful beyond this point.

    By the way, I'm using two Oxford-based bridges to connect two 8MB cache Matrox HDDs, and I'm using Bonnie++ and hdparm for testing. YMMV but the least I can say is Linux RAID support on Firewire still has a long way to go.

  • Be sure to use a journalled fs and LVM (Score:4, Informative)

    by Tracy Reed ( 3563 ) <treed AT ultraviolet DOT org> on Wednesday September 24, 2003 @09:45PM (#7051073) Homepage
    Others have mentioned the necessity of RAID 5 in a setup like this but let me point out that you don't want to fsck 1T of disk. I have had to watch the fsck of 500G of disk back before we had journalled fs and it was terrible. When we started attaching many terabytes of disk to Linux boxes we needed a better solution. So you will want to use a journalled fs. Reiserfs is my favorite. Then you will not want to have to backup/restore when you decide your current partitioning layout was a bad idea or just generally want to shuffle things around so be sure to use LVM also. I use LVM on all of my machines, even desktops, and it has really made life easier. Often you will need more room on /home but notice that /var has a couple gig unused and with LVM you just shrink /var and expand /home all without reboot and you are good to go.

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