120 Gig died
by jcf. Average Reading Time: about a minute.
So I have this small, self-built, fan-less (thus silent) server that has been backing up my laptop, serving my music and video and generally been a nice chap, and easy going.
That is until a couple of days ago it stopped responding. Today I had time to hook up a monitor and a keyboard to it, and booted to an emergeny linux root prompt. Seems my disk is kaputt in a major way. I get a lot of non-recoverable IDE / DMA and god knows what other errors.
I fsck’ed for a couple of hours (putting a toy-car on the enter key is a nice way to say “Yes” to all default prompts if you don’t know the relevant command line option for fsck) and it fixed about 127 million sectors and over 12 million Inodes.
After that /dev/hda4 (yes, that’s the big partition with all the data on it) still won’t mount cleanly, but I could assess the damage. Seems that all my backup’s are gone (rather – they moved to a new location in the file system (lost+found)) but my 30 gigs of music seem to have survived…
I can live with the loss of the backups (presuming that nothing bad happens until monday when I can throw a new disk in the box, reinstall Linux, recompile the kernel (for the VIA stuff), re-configure Samba, BackupPC and RSync (thank god, /etc survived)
Lessons learnt:
- A fanless box can get hot
- Disks don’t seem to like a lot of heat
Anyone know a simple and not to expensive solution for a RAID box with – let’s say 200 Gig? Little noise please – we don’t have a basement where we can put the big server rack.
Get yourself a Promise IDE raid controller and a couple of VERY quiet Samsung 160 gig disks (5400 rpm not the 7200 rpm version). That should do. Then use an additional 24V fan and run it at 12V.
Thanks Volker! I googled around and it seems that the Promise controllers are not very well supported under Linux (closed source, binary drivers). The “better” (and more expensive) solutions seems to be a 3ware card (like the 7506) which is a hardware raid (unlike the Promise which is basically a software RAID (through the drivers).
On first thought, the 3ware solution is more expensive (I would probably import it from the US for $300 (incl. shipping) and therefore – why bother. On second though, I have been burnt so many times by going the “cheap” route first, that the more expensive one looks more favorable.
OTOH – I’m not talking mission critical stuff on the RAID either…
Sigh. Decisions
And – interstingly – I can’t find the Samsung disks (the 5400) in Switzerland – no need for quiet disks here.