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Set up a RAID 5 array on the Interweb
Author: Gareth HalfacreePublished: 24th December 2007
While a virtual RAID 5 array over the Internet is damn cool, it's somewhat impractical.
Hack-A-Day has recently unveiled plans for a virtual RAID 5 array using free FTP servers as the ‘drives’. While the project is described as a ‘proof of concept’, it’s at first glance a promising idea: seamless storage to gigabytes of FTP space, and it doesn’t matter if one of the accounts get closed along the way.
The project certainly smells a bit Rube Goldberg at the moment, relying as it does on using NetDrive to mount the FTP accounts within Windows and then running FreeNAS in a VMWare virtual machine to create the fake RAID 5 array. That said, there’s nothing to stop the makers of FreeNAS duplicating the NetDrive idea should the concept take off.
The idea is pretty novel, but somewhat impractical. For the time and effort put into creating the fake RAID 5 system you could just have bought a bigger hard drive. As much as I like the idea of a virtual RAID system running over the Internet (and what self-respecting geek wouldn't?), I can’t see the concept taking off unless free FTP servers suddenly start offering a lot more space.
If you’re particularly bored over the Christmas holiday (and you haven’t drunk enough to mean operating the keyboard is a no-no) then feel free to give it a go. The original site is currently out of bandwidth, but there’s a mirror here. Let us know how you get on in the forums.
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Comments (4)Stats: 0.124 seconds
There's the bottleneck!
free ftp accounts tend to have transfer limits, i would imagine that the majority of your available bandwidth will be used to sync and send parity data
response times will be horrible, as will file searches.
i mean proof of concept is fine, but they could juat have easily built a raid5 array from 40 floppy drives and say the same things,
but i mean having a convoluted software raid setup just seems dumb to me, we all know software raid doesnt work very well, compared to the full fat server raid cards
unless you have a syncronus connection (same speed up and down, which you wont have in the UK unless you have a forked out serious £££ for an SDSL line) then the system is a non starter, never mind that using your net connection like that would probably classify you as a server, which is against the the T&C's of most domestic ISP's in the UK.
frankly if you want cheap serious distributed storage consider using amazons S3 services, or just follow the how to build a linux server guide on bit, will get something far more usefull, and you can run games servers off it as well :-)
Haven't you tried mozy yet?