The drive that holds our photos right now has years worth of digital pictures on it. What if it was the drive that had failed? What if we would never be able to see those pictures again and relive those memories? Well guys, if there is one way to get your wife to agree to buying some cool server equipment, then telling her that you may have lost your honeymoon pictures due to a drive failure is it.

Data redundancy has never really been a top priority for me. However, I work in IT so you’d think I’d be smarter about these things, but the fact of the matter is I just took for granted that I had never had the unfortunate event of a drive failing on me. I had been wanting to do a raid setup in that geeky I wanna do something cool with blinking lights and a server rack in my basement kind of way for a while, but the last time I bought a hard drive they were around a dollar a gig. I just couldn’t see spending hundreds of dollars on redundancy at the time. With times changing and my wife and I becoming increasingly dependent on this file server to store things that are important to us, I have decided to reconsider how much I would spend to ensure that the data stored on it can’t just disappear over night.

So, how much would it really cost to prevent that scenario from ever playing out? Its with that question on my mind that I started checking prices of the latest and greatest hard drives. I am planning a RAID 5 configuration with 4 drives likely with a plan to add a fifth one day as we get low on space.I’m finding that the prices have really come down a lot lately on hard drives, making this much easier to handle financially.

I have looked at a few different hard drives and sizes and broke down the pricing for each below. I tried to get a number that I could use to measure all of them against each other and I came up with the cost per gig after redundancy. This along with the total investment and the actual amount of storage that price would provide me are the things that I used to decide what drive to purchase.

As you can see there are a lot of attractive options. For me however, I have narrowed it down between the “cheapest” solution (WD 400 GB - $320) or the “best bang for my buck” (WD 750 GB - $560) solution. On one hand I can get almost 1TB of redundant storage for only $320 but I get over 2TB of redundant storage for only $140 more. But, do I really need 2TB of storage? Of course!

Thinking back, I had just about 1TB total of data before this drive failed, and that was with no redundancy. So the 2TB option would be a significant upgrade for us in both the storage space and the peace of mind. I think I’ll go with that. I’ll likely move the DVD burner down to the server too and burn a monthly backup disc of important files. Hopefully I will never have to worry about loosing important data again.

So bottom line, the final price for a 2TB RAID 5 configured file server using an old 1.8ghz Pentium to house it and a moderately priced RAID card capable of hardware RAID 5 will run me about $610. Not bad considering what that would cost if you bought a commercial file server with similar specs.

For the RAID card I am bidding on a 4 port card capable of RAID 5 on EBay right now. Here is the newegg product page for it:
LSI 1504064 64-bit 66 MHz PCI SATA MegaRAID 150-4 Kit 4 Port 64MB RAID 0/1/5/10 - Retail

I decided to do this when I realized that a couple others are working on their own versions of the project and repeating work that I had already done. It’s simply not fair for me to hold out on my progress. I was hoping to get everything perfect then release it all at once, but I think at this point its best that I get more people in the trenches with me to help figure out the problems.

So checkout the project page over at the Sourceforge project page. There is no release just yet, but those wishing to work on the project with me should pull down the latest from the Subversion server. If you send me a message, I can give you access as a developer so that you can commit changes. You will need an account with Sourceforge.net in order for this to work. Also, I suggest tortoiseSVN, it has shell integration and has been very easy for a novice SVN user, like myself, to get used to.

(Both plug N play harnesses featured in this diagram are available for sale through this website. Email robbienewton (at) gmail (dot) com if you are interested)

If you would like to check out Garrick’s project page, click here.

I have created a library for the PD72042B in the past but it was not good enough to use on a real board. So this time around I decided I would take my time and really put it together as it should be. Its created from all of the package information provided in the NEC data sheet which can be found here:
http://www.necel.com/function/en/iebus/d72042b.html.

The package is a 16-PIN PLASTIC SOP. I have attached the Eagle library file below, named IEBus.lbr. Leave a comment if you get some use out of it or if you find any problems with it. I have not produced a board from this at the time of posting, so please pay close attention to the pads before sending off anywhere to be made just to be sure. I would hate for someone to waste some money on one of my silly mistakes.

Get the lib file here:
PD72042B Eagle Cad Library File

Going forward, I am thinking of making the button that causes the relay to flip, programmable on the circuit. I could modify IEBus Studio to handle talking to the unit to program the button sequence and write it to the internal EEPROM. Maybe even putting in a couple more relays that are controlled the same way. So basically you would program a button sequence into the module that will flip a relay to do whatever you want.

Hopefully this nasty weather and the cold I caught from it will subside soon and I can move forward with some more testing. I need to get a working PCB, this breadboard is a huge pain in the ass to lug around.

Anyways, thats all I have for an update right now. I hope everyone is enjoying the holidays!

Once it was all hooked up, I connected the IEBus development board, started the Mouse Control test application on the carpc, started up Media Engine (a carpc front end application) and got my wife to test it out with me while I rolled the video camera.

Needless to say, everything is working well together. The firmware is translating the IEBus signals to text and transmitting over serial to the PC, the DLL (built from event discoveries in IEBus Studio) catches those signals and makes them available as software events. The Mouse Control test application has defined event handlers that will move the mouse and click on the location that came over the IEBus when I touch the screen.

Here are a couple pics of the setup:

I have put together a quick video of it that you can see here:

I have also decided to offer a DIY kit for the AH20 harness. It will include both the plug and the cap connectors, the DB9 connector and 25 of the special metal connectors needed for assembly of the 20 pin plug (5 extras).

Contact me via, robbienewton [aT] gmail [d0t] com to place an order!

So far I have had one person request it and have been thinking about doing it for myself to get to ACC, Power, and Diagnostics in the trunk. With a simple little harness for this you could make any solution involving those wires, plug n’ playable.

Let me know if it would be worth it for me to order some. It has to be a bulk order, therefore it would be quite an investment on my part, so if you care, please leave some feedback.

The reference to the “C” connector is from my 2006 ETM. Click on the thumbnail below to see a PDF with an image of the connector.

Connector C (8-Pin Navigation)