High-energy physics experiments are currently recording large amounts of data
and in a few years will be recording prodigious quantities of data. New methods
must be developed to handle this data and make analysis at universities
possible. Grid Computing is one method; however, the data must be cached at the
various Grid nodes. We examine some storage techniques that exploit recent
developments in commodity hardware. Disk arrays using RAID level 5 (RAID-5)
include both parity and striping. The striping improves access speed. The
parity protects data in the event of a single disk failure, but not in the case
of multiple disk failures.
We report on tests of dual-processor Linux Software RAID-5 arrays and
Hardware RAID-5 arrays using a 12-disk 3ware controller, in conjunction with
250 and 300 GB disks, for use in offline high-energy physics data analysis. The
price of IDE disks is now less than $1/GB. These RAID-5 disk arrays can be
scaled to sizes affordable to small institutions and used when fast random
access at low cost is important.Comment: Talk from the 2004 Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics
(CHEP04), Interlaken, Switzerland, 27th September - 1st October 2004, 4
pages, LaTeX, uses CHEP2004.cls. ID 47, Poster Session 2, Track