I decided some time ago that I would put an array of 4 large hard discs in my new computer at some point. About a week ago, that point had come. So, I searched online for the best deals on high-capacity SATA II hard drives, keeping a close eye on Western Digital, as they are my preferred brand. After a bit of bargain hunting I finally decided to purchase four Western Digital SE16 750GB drives from Mwave.com, since they had the best base price and low-cost shipping and I've shopped with them to great satisfaction before. Even though I placed my order later than anticipated, the drives still arrived at my door just in time for the weekend.

Before installing the drives, I collected the serial numbers so that I could register them, as I like to ensure that I have warranty coverage in case I need it. The first part of the installation was simple; all I had to do was remove my drive cage and bolt the drives into position within. Below, you can see the simple work area before installation and the filled drive cage after installation. Actually placing the full drive cage inside the computer, however, proved unexpectedly challenging.

     

I already had enough power connectors running to my lower drive bay for all four drives because I had left two cables running to the empty drive cage, knowing that I would eventually fill it with hard drives. What I hadn't realized at the time is how close to the lower fan the power cables would be once the hard drives were in place. I also hadn't realized how bulky a coil of six SATA cables would actually be. After a thorough examination of the empty spaces in the vicinity of the cables, I located two ideal locations for the excess coils. I wound the SATA cables as neatly as I could and placed them along the far side of the upper hard drive cage, where there is no air flow to be blocked. I pulled the excess from the power cables back into the chamber that houses the power supply and coiled them up next to the lower fan, again in a section that doesn't have air flowing through it. The results of this new cable management can be seen below.

     

You may notice that I no longer have the stock Intel CPU cooler. You can see it better in the images below, but keep in mind that those pictures were taken before any of the pictures above. I actually performed that upgrade a few weeks ago, placing a Zalman CNPS7700-Cu on my Q6600 in order to get better cooling performance. I also wanted something with a backplate, since the stock cooler seemed as though it wanted to push my processor out the back of my high-end motherboard. Even with my proc overclocked to 3.0 GHz and my RAM running at 1333 MHz I'd been running the new cooler at around 1300 RPM. With the new hard drives, though, and the weather as atrociously hot as it is, I decided to turn the fan up to 1800 and it's still running quietly. The biggest problem is that it's heavy, so I have to be careful when moving my computer to avoid putting too much strain on the motherboard. But, it should serve my needs until I figure out a decent liquid-cooling solution.

     

After getting everything installed and cleaned up it was time to set up my four new drives in a single RAID array. First, I went into my BIOS and activated its JMicron RAID controller and enabled RAID for each of the four new hard drives. Deciding to employ some level of redundancy until I am able to implement a real backup solution, I started the RAID utility and selected all four drives for a RAID1+0 configuration. After that, I booted up Kubuntu and began researching how to set up RAID in Linux. I was rather surprised to see a large preference for software RAID over hardware RAID and even more surprised to learn one of the primary reasons behind it.

During my research, largely at The Software-RAID HOWTO, I learned a great deal about RAID; probably more than I really wanted to learn. For instance, I leaned that the settings I had just made in my BIOS were completely useless because my onboard RAID controller is actually just a frontend for my BIOS to set aside selected drives for RAID while the actual array management is handled in software through drivers in a compatible OS. Linux, as it turns out, is not a compatible OS. It doesn't really matter, though, since onboard RAID is really just software RAID that pretends to be hardware RAID and is hardware-specific, anyway. Hence, the aforementioned preference for software RAID, given the very high price of true hardware RAID. So, I freed up the drives in my BIOS, disabled the JMicron RAID controller and proceeded to set up software RAID 10, which I'd read performs a bit better in Linux than RAID1+0 using the same configuration. After a bit of confusion over whether to format the drives then set up the array, or to format after the array was set up, I went with the latter and created a partitionable 1.4 TB striped and mirrored array, which I then set up to mount automatically when I start Kubuntu.

Now that I have 1.4 TB of space - double that once I switch over to a four-drive-wide striped array - I need to fill it. The first order of business is to migrate my /home directory over and symlink to it. That will ensure that all of my settings and large files are saved by default to the new array. The next task, I believe, is to backup all of my DVDs. I don't have too many, so they should fit, even if I keep archival backups in .iso format. I expect the backup process itself to take a good deal of time. But, I suspect that cataloging all the backups to my stringent specifications will take even longer. Fare thee well!