enough that you can afford to use one as a "disk box" with the cheapest possible video card, no sound card or other accessories, a network card, and as much disk space as you want.
There are far more elegant solutions to your space problem -- spending a bit more to get a good Windows NT server is one of them. However, if all you want is disk space in a hurry without configuration problems, networking to a box full of storage space certainly works.
Even Fast Ethernet is cheap. Last time I was at Fry's, the big discount electronics superstore, I saw a Netgear FA310TX Fast Ethernet PCI auto-sensing 100Base-TX/10Base-T adapter for $29, which is like they're giving it to me. Genuine 3Com boards work, but they were selling for nearly three times that price.
I already had two Garrett Ethernet hubs, one running at 10 Mbps and one at 100 Mbps. They're linked, so if I have 100-Mbps machines, I can simply plug
into the 100-Mbps board. I figured that if this worked, I'd have 100-Mbps capability in my new machine on the cheap.
I installed the Netgear board at 10 Mbps without incident. The drivers they supplied worked just fine. After the system was stable, I unplugged the cable from the 10-Mbps hub and plugged it into the 100-Mbps hub to see if the auto-sensing really worked. It didn't: there was no green light. The Netgear board has a bunch of lights to signal what's wrong. In this case, it wasn't getting a signal.
The Netgear manual says you must have Level 5 cable to run at 100 Mbps. I wasn't sure what my old cable was, but I'd read that on the box when I bought the board, so in preparation I also bought a 25-foot cable certified as Level 5. I forget what it cost, but it was under 20 bucks.
I plugged that into the Netgear board and the other end into the 100-Mbps hub, and voilà! No change in software; literally plug in the right cable to the faster hub, and you have 100-Mbps communications. Now
, three of my systems talk to each other at 100 Mbps (and to the rest of the network at 10 Mbps). I can sure notice the difference; enough so that I'll probably get a couple more of those boards and cables, and upgrade other PCI-bus systems.
The installation was painless. Plug and Play worked just fine (in Windows 95; and once everything works in that, I install NT4 and feed it the values that worked in Windows 95).
The moral of this story is that Pournelle's law holds: if you have a computer problem, check your cables first. The other lesson is more general: 100-Mbps equipment is now cheap enough that you ought to be using it, but it won't work without quality cables. Level 5 cable costs a little more, but once you have it, you can run at 10 Mbps until you get faster boards and then upgrade without pulling more wire. The odd thing is you may be better off paying attention to the brand of cable you buy than the brand of Ethernet board.
The Netgear Board went into Fireball
, which is my exper
imental dual 200-MHz Pentium Pro (the big ones with a 1-MB cache) system that I built from a Micronics W6-LI motherboard and a PC Power & Cooling case and cooling fans; see my December 1997 column for details.
Fireball also sports a Distributed Processing Technology (DPT) SmartCache IV SCSI controller and a DPT RAIDstation3 external RAID disk box. The RAID box contains a Quantum Fireball 3-GB SCSI drive and two Seagate Cheetah 4LP 4-GB drives. RAID is supposed to be a way to use inexpensive disk drives in an array without having to use identical drives. These were the cheapest large SCSI drives at Fry's; the Quantum was on sale, for I think under $100.
The RAID box supports three RAID modes. The first is RAID0, which has no redundancy or safety at all. The RAID0 array looks like one great big drive to the system. Files are written across the array in a manner to optimize performance. It's fast, and you get all the storage the drives are capable of.
Second, it supports RAID1, which is mirrored
data in pairs of drives. I could, for example, pair the two Seagate drives, and everything written to one of them would then be written to the other. If either failed, the other would have everything on it. RAID1 is fast on both reads and writes, and utterly safe unless both drives fail. It halves disk capacity, of course.
In the RAID box, I could have two drives in a RAID1 array, and the third can be a hot-swappable spare. That is, if one of the drives fails, the third, which has been on standby, would swing in to substitute for the failed drive. The system would build up a copy of everything on the working drive, and within minutes, I'd be back to a fully backed up RAID1 system. Alternatively, the third drive can just be a drive, not part of the RAID system at all.
The third alternative is RAID5. A RAID5 system requires at least three drives. All files are written across the three in such a way that if one of the drives fails, you can recover all the data through error-correction files stored on all
three drives. This happens invisibly. RAID5 is slower than RAID0 or RAID1, but most of the penalty is in writing files; reads in RAID5 are fast.
RAID5 also uses disk space. In my case, I have two 4-GB drives and one 3-GB drive, but the final formatted RAID drive (which looks to the OS like one big drive) is only 6.3 GB, which for Windows 95 formats into three 2-GB drives with some left over that I could partition into a special swap-file drive. It makes sense to set up the swap-file drive with the largest disk cluster size your system can handle. Never use that drive for anything but the swap file. You'll get significant performance improvements.
Setting up the RAID arrays is both easy and complex. The RAID box comes with three drive trays, into which you install your drives. Those then slide into the box and are turned on with a small key. They are hot-swappable. You can pull one out while the system is running, and, provided you have a redundant array (RAID1 or RAID5), you won't lose any data. You
could then install a new hard drive into the drive tray, put the tray back in the box, and use the key to turn it on. The DPT software will take care of the rest.
The hard part of the installation is putting the drives into the drive trays. The array sets the SCSI ID number for the drive; to do that, you must connect cables from the drive tray onto the jumper pins that control the SCSI ID for the drive. It's explained reasonably well in the DPT RAIDstation3 documentation, but the ease varies from drive to drive.
On the Quantum Fireball, it was easy to connect to the SCSI ID jumper pins, but I never did find a connection to connect the "drive busy" light cable to. Consequently, I have no drive-activity indicator on that drive. The Seagate drives, on the other hand, have good documentation, making it easy to connect both the SCSI ID cables and the drive light cable. However, those connections are on the back of the drive in a position that makes it hard, mechanically, to get the drive into the drive tra
y once the cables are attached. It took me nearly half an hour to get it right. Once I did, though, there were no problems.
When the physical installations are done, invoke Windows 95 and install the DPT software. That's a breeze. Then run the software.
The DPT software is nearly self-explanatory,
but
it takes a long time (about an hour) to build an array, and there is absolutely no indication on your screen that anything is happening. Similarly, there's an option to format a disk in the array. It's not explained well in the DPT documents, but this is a low-level format.
If you start that format, it will take an hour or more. Once it has started, if you halt it before it is finished, the drive will be useless, unavailable, invisible to the OS, and shown as "impacted" by the DPT software. Fortunately, the remedy is simple: invoke the DPT Storage Manager program, select that drive, and hit the "format" button. Then go out to dinner. When you come back in an hour or so, the drive will work j
ust fine and can be added to an array.
Alas, there is absolutely no indication that the format button
does
anything and no progress indicators. The drive light will blink furiously, but if you haven't connected the cable to the right place for the "drive busy" connection, you won't see a drive light. In the case of the Quantum Fireball drive, I simply must have faith; which works. Eventually the format is done, and the drive is in fine shape.
After that, Bob's your uncle. The DPT Storage Manager software is slow and thorough and quite self-explanatory, and you can create RAID0, RAID1, or RAID5 at will. Each takes a while -- about an hour -- as does switching from one to another, and you must save your data before doing it; but it all works about as advertised. In theory, you can change RAID types without losing data, but I'd sure hate to try.
My first effort produced a RAID5 setup that turns 11 GB of storage on three drives into a single 6+-GB drive (which I formatted into three 2-GB driv
es due to the limitations of Windows 95). When I saw that worked, I changed it into one 4-GB RAID1 drive (mirroring the two Seagate drives) and one independent 3-GB drive. This gives me 7 GB, with 4 GB self-backing. That will become the safety cache for all-important storage.
I used PowerQuest's PartitionMagic to partition my RAID5 array into three 2-GB drives, and again when I changed over to RAID1 plus an independent drive. PartitionMagic sees a RAID array as one drive, which it partitions like any other. One note of caution: PartitionMagic works like magic until you hit 8 GB. It simply ignores any drive space beyond 8 GB, no matter how large your drive is. That's about its only problem, and PowerQuest claims they'll have it fixed Real Soon Now.
I have been partitioning my drives into 2-GB logical drives, because of Windows 95. When I change Fireball over to NT 4, I will repartition to 4-GB logical drives.
Interestingly, Windows 95 can network-access more than 2 GB of space although it can't see
more. That is, Spirit, a Pentium Pro NT4 server built from the husk of Big Cheetah (hence the name Spirit), has two 4-GB drives. One is a Micropolis AVI external drive, one of the best drives in the house. It will send audio and visual data in a continuous stream. Alas, Micropolis has ceased to exist, although I note that Fry's advertised some Micropolis drives this morning.
Anyway, if I look at Spirit's drives across the network with a Windows 95 machine, they appear to be 2 GB only. I see 1310 KB used space, 836,894 KB space available, and 2147 KB total. If I look at that same drive with Princess, my Compaq Professional Workstation 5000, running NT, I see 3448 KB used space, 836,894 KB space available, and 4285 KB total. None of this is a problem: I can always find files on Spirit through the network.
Anyway, the RAIDstation3 is a good choice for critical mass storage. RAID5 is a bit costly in space, but it works, it's easy to set up, and while the write-time penalty is fairly high, the read-time c
ost is negligible. RAID1 is utterly safe (for the mirrored drive) and as fast as the drive can be, and it leaves a drive for you to use as you like. It's all easy to set up, experiment with, and change around. It's a classy solution to your data-storage problems. I use DPT SmartCache SCSI controllers on many systems, and I've always been impressed with their capability and reliability. Recommended.
If you add a hard drive to an existing system
, chances are that the new drive will be larger than the old. Most of your program and system files are and may have to be on logical drive C, but changing your system around so that C resides on your new and larger drive is tricky, and it can be dangerous if you don't quite know what you're doing.
However, there's a simpler solution. BigDisk, from Syncronys Softcorp, will move files for you while tricking the OS into believing that they're still on the C drive. You use a simple slider control to indicate how much free space you want on your C drive, and t
he program does the rest. It won't move critical files, and the method used (they're all put into one big folder on your new disk) makes it relatively safe to use either BigDisk itself or a file manager of your own choosing to selectively restore files that shouldn't have been moved.
Alternatively, BigDisk will use redirectory trickery to make your system think all the disk space on your system is one big disk, so that you have a very large C drive. You can then forget about it.
Installation is simple, the manual is clear, the recovery paths seem reasonable, and the company includes people I've known for years -- one was formerly associated with Quarterdeck's CleanSweep -- so it all seems safe enough, and it's a simple solution to file-location nightmares.
My only doubts here involve using redirectors with memory-resident compression programs like Mijenix's FreeSpace. Either program is reliable acting alone, but one of the programs may not understand what the other is doing. Thus, I'd be cautious
about using BigDisk with any on-the-fly compression program; but then I'm always cautious about compression programs to begin with.
If you're thinking of adding a new and large hard drive to an existing system, BigDisk can help you get things organized without your having to do much work.
I'm told that Syncronys will soon bring out a version of BigDisk that lets you map in network drives so they seem to be part of your C drive. I'm looking forward to that, and I'll let you know when I get it.
The next addition to storage at Chaos Manor is CD
, both CD-R (recordable, i.e., write only) and CD-RW (read and write). The cheapest and most useful is CD-R, but if you have the extra cash, it may be worth it to get a Ricoh MediaMaster MP-6200S Internal CD-RW drive. This will function as a (rather slow -- 6x) CD-ROM drive, write CD-R gold discs, and work with CD-RW if you need that.
It's a SCSI device that in my case operates off the DPT caching controller in Fireball, but it comes with a PE Logic
SCSI board that has both internal and external SCSI connectors. If you don't have SCSI, this will work, because installation is a snap, and everyone ought to have SCSI.
You also get Adaptec's Easy CD Creator and DirectCD software, making it simple to copy CD-ROM discs or make new ones, as well as manage the CD-RW capability. The Adaptec software is easy to learn and has a mode for testing before you start burning a CD-R.
One caution about CD-RW: unless you have a fairly new system, your CD-ROM drive probably can't read CD-RW discs. The only drive I have that reads CD-RW discs (other than the Ricoh drive that created them) is a Panasonic 24x ATAPI CD-ROM drive that resides in Cyrus, my Cyrix 6x86 P-166 system. Most newer CD-ROM drives will read CD-RW discs, but newer means manufactured after the fall of 1997. The buzzword to look for is
multiread
with a silver sticker. Drives that have that will read CD-RW discs. Others probably won't.
I don't use the Ricoh drive for CD-RW anywhere near a
s much as for CD-R. Fry's now has blank CD-R discs for under $2, so once a week, I use the Ricoh drive to burn a new "full Monty" backup of every word I have ever written (at least all of them I have in electronic readable form). I carry the latest of those on trips, so if the house burns down I'm still in business. I leave copies in safe-deposit boxes and at Larry Niven's house. I also make copies of the really critical system software on all my machines.
We currently recommend the Ricoh CD-R and CD-RW internal SCSI drives, and the Philips CDR-870 external drive. One caution: you can get two discs into a Philips drive. When you do, it scrapes off the laser. Not good. Don't do it. We managed to.
I've saved the newest backup system for last.
We have an Indigita iDT 2500 SCSI tape drive. It holds 6 GB on each tape.
The iDT 2500 can be an internal drive or an external drive; ours is internal in Fireball to back up the entire network. That does not make full use of the iDT 2500's capabilities,
but it is something I need. One problem with installation. All my flat SCSI cables have three connectors, one for the controller and two for the devices; but both the Ricoh MediaMaster and Fireball's main hard drive are internal SCSI devices. Of course, I could go buy a four-connector flat SCSI cable, but it's storming outside.
Fortunately, the Micronics motherboard has an on-board Adaptec SCSI, but we were using the DPT SmartCache IV and never implemented it. Reset the machine, enter the BIOS setup, and enable the SCSI drive; install the Adaptec SCSI drivers that came with the board; and then connect the iDT 2500. It took longer to do it than to tell about it, but not much longer.
Now I have a new drive, T, and an icon of a tape drive. Put in a tape, format it, and there's 6 GB of data storage available. The interesting thing about the iDT 2500 is that the system can't really tell it from a disk: you copy files and such to it, and you can selectively add and delete and overwrite as you choose. Moreov
er, once it finds a file, it's
fast
: you can play audio and small-screen real-time video direct from the tape. It's great for saving Internet multimedia downloads.
Note I say once it finds the file. It can take up to a minute to find and open a new file, and even to get a directory takes many seconds. After all, it is tape. But once it has located the file, it reads multimedia files so fast you wouldn't know it wasn't a disk drive.
Because it looks like a disk drive, you can share the iDT 2500 across the network; having it available across the network means you can save to it from anywhere. As I write this, I'm using Canyon Software's Drag and File Gold to find and copy the latest versions of everything I ever wrote and store it on Fireball's RAID1 drive. Once that's made up, I'll copy it to tape, as well as write it off to yet another CD-R disc. When I did my "full Monty" backup last time, I forgot to look into some magneto-optical (MO) discs, which may have some stuff that didn't get onto o
ne of the networked drives. This time for sure.
I'll mostly use the iDT 2500 as backup storage, since the cost per gigabyte for storage media is very low while 6-GB chunks are more convenient than the 600 MB you get on a CD-R disc. However, since it's on the other end of a 100-Mbps Ethernet, I can also use it to store any multimedia files I download from the Internet. If you're looking into data storage, be sure to check out Indigita's iDT 2500. More as I use it more, but I like it already.
Credentialism has become the curse ofthe age.
It's no longer what you know, but what credentials you have that determine salary and promotion. Now much of this is due to Equal Opportunity legislation. If you can't prove that the person you promoted is somehow "superior," you could be sued by a legal bounty hunter just waiting for the opportunity; thus the emphasis on credentials like college degrees.
Credentialism has also created opportunities. One credential that's worth a lot of money is MCSE -- Micro
soft Certified Systems Engineer. There are a number of categories. None of them require college degrees. They do require you to pass a thorough and difficult exam, but the exam is based on practical knowledge, not on remembering who said what.
If I were young, had never made it to college, and wanted to get ahead, I'd go for one of the MCSE credentials; it's guaranteed employment at fairly decent wages. I'd be particularly interested if I were doing technical-support work but didn't have any credentials.
The usual way to get the MCSE credential is to enroll in a trade school, which doesn't so much teach you about engineering Microsoft products as how to pass the MCSE exam. These are tough exams, and having some coaching in a trade school certainly does no harm; but you don't have to enroll in classes to take and pass the MCSE exams. You can learn on your own.
If you want to try that, the best way is to get the appropriate New Riders MCSE book and CD-ROM. These books aren't cheap, but they contain
everything you need to know to pass the exam, and the CD has sample tests.
Understand, while it would theoretically be possible to learn enough to pass the exam from one of these books, it's not likely anyone will do it; you need some practical knowledge and experience. The people who will find these books most useful are those who know a lot about the subject, but don't know it in a systematic way; who have holes in their knowledge base; and who are a bit nervous about exams anyway.
The New Riders MCSE books are the computer books of the month. Just be sure to notice the publication date; books of this kind become dated as quickly as Microsoft releases new versions of its products. Generally, the titles that say
MCSE Training Guide
are more recent than the ones that say
MCSE Study Guide
.
If you already know Windows NT, or Exchange Server, or one of the other major Microsoft product lines, but like the scarecrow in the
Wizard of Oz
you don't have a diploma, go to
http://www.newriders.com
and see if there's not an MCSE category and book for you. It could change your life.
Four Ways to More Storage
