Without me having the time and the hardware to do a real world test this week I’ve been spending a lot of time reading up on my future setup.  It would appear that since GlusterFS doesn’t (at this time but Raid6 is slotted for version 1.7) support parity blocks, a Raid5 style setup would not be feasable.  The best you could hope for with as little hardware as I have is to run a Raid 0 or Raid 1 setup.  With some advanced setup and multiple drives across 2 computers, a Raid01 setup would be possible, but I don’t have the means to try it out.

Once I get all the kinks out of my current, sloppy setup, I will post a howto describing both the installation, setup and pitfalls I’ve encountered along the way.

Now the setup I have experimented with was just a means for me to see what would happen if I setup 2 machines, one with a 200GB partition and the other with a 60GB partition.  After I configured both machines and mounted the GlusterFS clustered/striped file system to /mnt/pool, I had a nice, shiny ~250GB partition.  This is cool for 3 reasons.

1. I don’t need the same hardware in both machines to make this setup work.

2. I get approx 100% of both drives being used in the setup.  HD1 + HD2.

3. I get a slight speed increase due to the striping, similar to RAID 0.  When data is written or read from the drives, I have 2 sources instead of one.  So my maximum theoretical bandwidth is no longer limited to hard drive transfer rates, but to the 2 system’s drives or the network, whichever comes first.

I am testing these out on a slower network setup, 100Mb/s bandwidth, but once I have a more advanced setup I want to move to something a little more robust, 1000Mb/s.

My setup right now has one MAJOR flaw in it.  If one drive goes down (drive, system, network) then the whole /mnt/pool file system is unavailable.  Again, think Raid 0.  For me this would only be useful if I had a bunch of drives that I just wanted to use as a faster way to serve unimportant data.

Since all the data I have is important, that leaves me with 2 options.  Simple mirroring across multiple drives (Raid 1) or what I’m going to try in my next step: File replication over striping.  Think more like Raid 5.  Benefits will be the following:

1. Redundant data.  Data is mirrored across multiple drives to allow redundancy and a speed increase.

2. Speed increase.  Since data is stored on more than one drive, the machines read from multiple locations and faster read times can be achieved.

3. Storage space.  While not as impressive as Raid 0 on it’s use of space, Raid 5 uses a minimum of 3 drives and stores like this.

Drive one:     1/2/3

Drive two:     2/3/1

Drive three:   3/1/2

Data is figured being “Size * (Number of disks – 1) / number of disks).  So assuming these are three 1TB drives, it would look like this:  3,000,000,000 * (3 – 1 = 2) / 3 = 2,000,000,000.  So you get storage space equal to ~66% of the total drive space in the above example.  Three 1TB drives will give you 2TB of usable space.  Three 100GB drives give you 200GB usable.  Assuming you use 5 drives…5,000,000,000 * (5-1=4)/5 = 4TB.  3 gives you 2, 5 gives you 4, 10 gives you 9.

4. If one node (computer/network connection/hard drive) goes down, the whole system keeps on going.  Again, since the same data is stored on multiple drives, if one system goes down, the controlling machine or machines will see this and know to pull data from the backup source.

Looking at what I had listed earlier, if we take down drive 1, the data on drive 1 is also on drive 3.  So drive 3 takes over serving drive 3 and 1 data and drive 2 keeps on going since it’s the original.

My main problem I have right now is finding another system that has a decent sized drive in it.  I found a spare machine here with a nice 13GB drive in it, I know, it’s huge.  But for real world tests, this is too small.  I want at least an 80GB drive and while I had 2 not so long ago, I gave them both to my father in law because I saw no need to keep such small drives.  I could use them now.

More to come when I have it.  Stay tuned…

I wound up finding GlusterFS that suited my needs. It allows you to span hard drives across multiple networked systems and mount all machines as 1 drive. Now I’m suddenly finding a possible use for all of those old systems around the house.

The only limit to how big you go is how many machines you have linked together and how fast your network is. You’ll need a fast backbone to pull GB/sec but I have seen places on their site make reference to some really impressive numbers.

I’m at the researching stage at this point and garhering materials, so as soon as I have a working model I will post a howto on my setup and any issues I run into.

The interface is very simple to use, just select the drive, click analize and if you see a lot of red squares or white spaces between the blue, just click the defrag button and minimize.  Though it would be better to not use the machine while running it, this Defraggler isn’t as picky about not touching the machine like the Windows version.  Keep working, go do something else or just sit and watch it move your data around.  Your choice.

Another key feature for me is that it works to move your most used files to the front of the drive.  For those of you that need a refresher course, the closer to the center of the drive a file is kept, the slower the read/write speed.  So if you just emptied your recycle bin (or run CCleaner), it would be wise to use this program.  Your files that you use on a daily basis after a CCleaner run will probably be anywhere between 300MB to several GB toward the middle of your drive.

Now on most of the newer machines, I don’t notice too much of a difference after running, but I still consider it good practice.  I have noticed faster boot times on most of the machines tested on, and if it’s an older machine with a smaller hard drive, the speed increase of daily tasks can be substantial.

So if you are a believer, or even a non-believer of defragmenting, give this program a try.  It gets 2 thumbs up from me.  Download it from here.

Developed by Piriform, CCleaner (formerly “Crap Cleaner”) will clear your hard drive of all the crap files left on your computer that you don’t really need…and most of the time you don’t know are there.  Most people delete IE history or even temporary files, but this thing goes DEEP into your system to delete anything that you don’t really need.  I was on a computer about a month back, and the machine was running very slow with only 90MB left of disk space.  Yes, 90MB not GB.  So I ran this little tool that wound up deleting almost 800MB of crap files…most were logs from windows updates and temp files.  I was amazed.  Add in the fact that it will even clean up wasted and error prone items from your registry, and that makes it a winner in my book.

Download CCleaner from the developer’s website, here.

Registry scan and clean

Windows Cleaner

So here I am talking about a great program called Spybot – Search and Destroy. It is an anti-spyware program that has helped in solving and preventing countless issues on computers I’ve used in the past.

First and one of the most attractive features is…it’s free.
I am a firm believer in the fact that most issues with spyware and virus infections are done on the home user and that those companies providing software for prevention should provide it to those users for free. Corporate users still need to pay for the software but they will…for them it’s a small price to pay to stay protected. But if you take Granny who only checks her email every 2 weeks, she’s not going to spend her Social Security check on a program that will keep the pictures of her grandchildren safe. It isn’t worth it to her…the computer was probably a gift and she can’t see spending any money on the machine. So now Granny is infected with God knows what, spreading all over the net infecting all the other ignorant people who won’t or don’t want to spend the money for software that they need. So back on topic, I’m always happy to see an Essential Software that winds up being free.

Second, it is easy to use.
There are a few things that could be made a little easier. The initial setup does just about everything you need to scan your computer and lock it down tight. The only thing I wish it had was some initial setup for a scheduled scan. Sure you can set it up later, but unless you know what you are looking for, you will overlook it.

Third, it just works.
One of the greatest thing about it is right off the bat it does an “immunization” of your pc, blocking all blacklisted sites retrieved from their servers. That helps keep down bad software downloading more bad software in the background, also helping keep you from getting bad software in the first place. Not perfect but definitely a must. Also the scanning engine is very thorough and gives a description of the program on the right so you can be sure of what you are about to delete permanently from your computer.

Link to download is here.