How can I combine 10 hard drives from 10 servers?
 

I have 10 old serves. Each have 2 40 gig drives.

I want to set them up so I can access all 800 Gigs as one logical drive/partition.

What are some options to do this?

I would also like it to be redundant. So if one old server crashes the data is still available.

Some kind of software raid???

For starters if you go redundant you will cut your size to 400 gb. If you shove all ten hard drives into one box with multiple controller cards you could just run lvm over raid. I have had 5 drives(1 to boot nonraid and 4 in the raid0 array) set up as lvm over raid0 (not redudant) woked pretty fast. If you want to keep the drives in separate machines it will probably wind up as some form of nas system (network attached storage). You might check lite nas's (OS) web site and see if they can do this. If you go the second route report back how you managed it. It should be an interesting read.

Lazlow

Good ideas!

I would pile them all in 1 or 2 cases but these servers are very small and they only hold 2 drives. No cd no floppy. Plus I just kind of want to see how a distributed storage system would work. Im thinking some sort of software raid will be the best.

If anyone else has any ideas I would love to hear them!

Configure each server as an iscsi target and map the drives as an LVM at the client. You can add a RAID layer in the middle if you want some kind of redundancy. You'll need some funky RAID configuration if you want redundancy at the server level though.

You didn't say whether you had FC, IDE or SCSI drives. You best bet would be putting them in one system running RAID 6 with LVM. I would go RAID 6 because your drives are so old. RAID 6 is like RAID 5 but with two parity disks. Reads are fast, but writes are little slower than RAID 5. You'll need to pay attn to the power supply to make sure it can supply the power to 20 drives. You might need to go to two systems. Make sure you stagger drive spin up or the power supply will fault on power up.

Run a S.M.A.R.T. data check on the drives to see what life is left on the drive.

Yeah thats probably the best setup.

They are IDE drives.

I thought I remember reading about a clustering linux live CD that combined the storage and cpu power of all the boxes with little to no configuration.

Does anyone know the name of that and or if it is still out in the wild?