Shoe-String Fibre Channel Disk Array

Who doesn't want more disk space? I considered just jamming another ATA disk into my PC, but after some scheme, I decided to build a fibre channel disk array at home. Yes, it's slightly over kill.

Acquisition

I started by looking for fibre channel disk arrays on eBay. I found 5 Seagate 73FC disks and a Q-Logic SANblade 2100. I then got some glue from CK Computer Systems. From them, I got 4 loop T-cards, a start T-card, a copper-to-optical converter and a long stretch of fibre optic cable. From the free pile at work, I was able to get an old SCSI enclosure. It was designed to hold four 5.25" disks.

Construction

I started by gutting most of the enclosure's contents. The tray made it impratical to mount the 5 disks since the enclosure was designed for 4 disks. I took a sheet of circuit board, cut it and drilled it and mounted the four of the drives to it. I then attached the four drives down to the base of the enclosure with L-brackets. Using more L-brackets, I hung the remaining disk off the side of the column of disks. I was one power connector short from the power supply, so I soldered another another one into the power supply. I then wired up everything with T-cards and installed the media converted in side the case. I had to cover the old slots left in the back by the SCSI connectors with plastic to make the air flow proper.

The next task was installing the QLogic card into my PC. That was without incidient on Linux after downloading the proper firmware. The qla2xxx driver displayed the disks and I used mdadm to create a RAID 5 array. I then made this array into a physical volume for use by LVM. My /etc/mdadm.conf looks like this:

ARRAY /dev/md0 level=raid5 num-devices=5 UUID=52072741:d659caf8:5cd4c357:bb36a046
DEVICE partitions

When I start my system, a simple mdadm -A -s --auto=md && vgchange -a y will find the array disks, assemble them into a RAID 5 array and activate the logical volume on them. Invoking vgchange -a n && mdadm /dev/md0 -D will deactivate the logical volume and disband the array.

Mmmm...huge quantities of storage. And I can easily expand with more disks and T-cards. The other advantage is I can put this noisy encloure somewhere deep in my basement where I won't hear them grinding.