Sorry for any delay…I found an old copy of Final Fantasy X11 while I was getting a tire fixed the other day (gamestop is really close to discount tire). Picked it up used for cheap so most of my hours awake have gone into that.
Anyway, I’ll get to the point…
While going through all my old parts I have found enough pieces to put together 2 nearly identical machines. Nothing to write home about…they’re older 462 Semprons and I’ll run them with 4 80 GB drives spanned and replicated between them. They will serve their purpose as my glusterfs servers/clients to at least do a complete test run. Once I can justify the purchase of better materials, I’ll upgrade to 4 1 TB drives on a more modern 64-bit system. That should give me a replicted 2 TB of storage compared to my test of 160GB. Both tests will be similar to a RAID 01 setup.
My greatest hurdle I’ve run into was getting a mixed system of a 32-bit and 64-bit talking to each other but found the version of glusterfs I had for each was the wrong version. So I had to compile them both using this guide http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=883614&highlight=gluster and things started working out better. I would still have issues with the machines suddenly disconnecting but I was only running spanning, not replication and the drives were 2 different sizes…one 60 GB and one 200 GB on 2 machines. I was planning on going with more machines and more drives but 2 machines with a few drives will do everything I need.
I was excited to see that Seagate recently released a 1.5TB drive. HUGE storage. Most of the online reviews have talked about dependability issues…not something I want to deal with. Besides, I can pick up 4 1TB drives for about the same price as 2 1.5 TB drives…and that equals to more spanned storage anyway. Just means I’ll do an upgrade in the future.
