rapoffice Posted February 1, 2006 Share Posted February 1, 2006 Hay guys great forum cant wait to sink my teeth in a bit more..... I have to admin about 30 200gig sata drives that are filled with images, I'm a digi tech. At the moment I have them all (catalogued and numbered) sitting in antistatic bags stacked with dividers in airtight cases. When I need something I load the drive into a sata enclosure attach to external sata .......blah blah This works fine for most things coz I hardly ever need to load things but I have one client that is needing things more and more and I was looking for another solution. This is when I stumbled upon the fact that x86 linux distros can access HFS+ volumes. http://www.ardistech.com/hfsplus/ . My thought is I could cheaply make a bunch of pentium/amd based boxes with hfs+ sata drives attached (maybe not the boot as hfs+). Anyway anyone thought about / tried this before? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Swad Posted February 1, 2006 Share Posted February 1, 2006 If I get the picture of what you're wanting, you need to quickly access HFS drives in a certain number of boxes? I've never tried HFS and linux, but if it's speed you're wanting, OS X can search and use HFS very quickly (obviously, since it's the native file system). Do you need one box per drive? If not, a Mac attached to how ever many drives you had might be the best way to go. There are a few other great filesystems. Any reason why you're wanting HFS? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DrJägermeister Posted February 1, 2006 Share Posted February 1, 2006 Hay guys great forum cant wait to sink my teeth in a bit more..... I have to admin about 30 200gig sata drives that are filled with images, I'm a digi tech. At the moment I have them all (catalogued and numbered) sitting in antistatic bags stacked with dividers in airtight cases. When I need something I load the drive into a sata enclosure attach to external sata .......blah blah This works fine for most things coz I hardly ever need to load things but I have one client that is needing things more and more and I was looking for another solution. This is when I stumbled upon the fact that x86 linux distros can access HFS+ volumes. http://www.ardistech.com/hfsplus/ . My thought is I could cheaply make a bunch of pentium/amd based boxes with hfs+ sata drives attached (maybe not the boot as hfs+). Anyway anyone thought about / tried this before? Works on the most actual distros out of the box: mkdir /tmp/OSX86 mount -t hfsplus /dev/sda1 /tmp/OSX86 (change /dev/sda1 with your HFS+ partition) If you just have a linux as OS without Darwin or OSX86 as multiboot on your PCs I think it's better to use a journaled file system for Linux like EXT3 or ReiserFS. If you need a partiton for DATA exchange between different OS, FAT32 is supported by almost all OS. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rapoffice Posted February 1, 2006 Author Share Posted February 1, 2006 Sorry guys I dont think I'm explaining myself too well. Basically I'm trying create some cheap servers that use my existing and filled Hfs+ sata drives in cheap Pc boxes. At the moment I have a few single drive enclosure that I connect to one of the G5 workstations. At around 6Tb of existing drives I dont really wont to start over with another files system. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DrJägermeister Posted February 1, 2006 Share Posted February 1, 2006 Sorry guys I dont think I'm explaining myself too well. Basically I'm trying create some cheap servers that use my existing and filled Hfs+ sata drives in cheap Pc boxes. At the moment I have a few single drive enclosure that I connect to one of the G5 workstations. At around 6Tb of existing drives I dont really wont to start over with another files system. That's no problem,you can mount them all in Linux if you want. Just the boot partition for your Linux OS itself must be a Linux filesystem. P.S: If you use them during a long period only in Linux, I think it's the best to convert your partitions to a Linux filesystem Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rapoffice Posted February 1, 2006 Author Share Posted February 1, 2006 do you have any experience with doing this and is there a perfered linux flavor at the moment I'm swaying towards ubuntu Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DrJägermeister Posted February 1, 2006 Share Posted February 1, 2006 do you have any experience with doing this and is there a perfered linux flavor at the moment I'm swaying towards ubuntu I have mount my OSX86 partition (only few GB not 6 TB ) in Suse 9.3 and Suse 10, it works fine for read and write. I think the most other actual distros can also handle HFS+ so just take the one you prefer. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rapoffice Posted February 1, 2006 Author Share Posted February 1, 2006 Well I have an old pc pentium4 laying around so I'll give it ago with a backed up drive and see how things go. Thanks for your fast responses. I'll let you know how i go in a couple days. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Metrogirl Posted February 1, 2006 Share Posted February 1, 2006 Well I have an old pc pentium4 laying around so I'll give it ago with a backed up drive and see how things go. Thanks for your fast responses. I'll let you know how i go in a couple days. Also can confirm Suse is reliable. Used 9 and 10 to mount HFS+ without probs. Plus I like Suse. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sigxcpu Posted February 1, 2006 Share Posted February 1, 2006 For 30 discs you will need a lot of power supplies Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rapoffice Posted February 2, 2006 Author Share Posted February 2, 2006 Yeah I know I'll probably only mount 10 disc per case. Merto' did you mount them permenantly or just mount and eject as needed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Metrogirl Posted February 2, 2006 Share Posted February 2, 2006 Mount and eject, but on one occasion I left an HDD mounted more than 24 hours and had no problem. The HDDs were fine when returned to a Mac as well, i.e. they didn't get screwed over in the process. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
johnniecarcinogen Posted February 3, 2006 Share Posted February 3, 2006 Yeah I like suse too, you do however have to install hfsplus - tools but no biggie. I'm not sure if it was on suse's servers or a packman repository but i got it through yast. EDIT: btw I've had my hfs+ (osx86 ofcourse) partition mount at boot by adding it to the /etc/fstab since november and no problems yet, my linux partition is reiserfs. I even changed the permissions on osx86 folders from suse and everything is fine 2months later. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wmarsh Posted February 3, 2006 Share Posted February 3, 2006 Actually, you don't need to install hfsplus - tools to access hfsplus with suse 10.0. I think support is actually compiled into the kernel. See this post from October. I was going to recompile kernel to support hfsplus and found I didn't need to. http://forum.osx86project.org/index.php?sh...574entry22574 I have used it, mostly read access but occasionally r/w when something screwed up since October with no problems. Used both 10.4.1 qnd 10.4.3 8f1111g. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rapoffice Posted February 4, 2006 Author Share Posted February 4, 2006 Thanks guys I've been real busy shooting so haven't had the time to look at this any further but I'll get a chance this week. Not sure now whether to go with suse10 or ubuntu now though. Is it better to run the os off a ide drive than sata. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dwaltz Posted February 23, 2006 Share Posted February 23, 2006 Thanks guys I've been real busy shooting so haven't had the time to look at this any further but I'll get a chance this week. Not sure now whether to go with suse10 or ubuntu now though. Is it better to run the os off a ide drive than sata. i've been using Ubuntu 5.10 (a recent convertion from SuSE) to access (3) hfs+ drives in a similar manner. hfsplus support is included by default. I have had no problems mounting hfs/hfsplus drives and accessing the data (read only) via Ubuntu, the fun came when i wanted to write to the drive... go easy if using the Linux HFS+ Support tools (hpmount, hpumount, hpfsck etc) as i haven't been that careful and have trashed the Volume Header (/descriptor) and after some "assistance" now have a repartitioned drive in serious need of professional recovery! Otherwise hfs/hfsplus in linux is all good; but i'd stick with OSX if you want to read/write to the drives. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rapoffice Posted February 23, 2006 Author Share Posted February 23, 2006 Gee I just downloaded Suse10 and was about to spend the day getting this going but after that last post I think I might look at other ways to do this, Ie hotswap esata enclosure and a external sata Pcix card connect directly to a G5 box on the giga ethernet switch. I rarely need all thirty drives online actually never all thirty. With a 4 port port_multiplier card I can have 16 drives at a time. This seems safer to me. I'll just leasve suse10 for fun. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pu7o Posted February 23, 2006 Share Posted February 23, 2006 You can access HFS and HFS+ fine with linux, with full read-write capabilities, however the problem is that there isn't any trustworthy filesystem check program for hfsplus filesystems in linux, and the linux kernel doesn't allow you to mount a badly-unmounted HFS+ filesystem as read-write. So it's actually possible to run a linux system from an HFS+ partition, except of course that if it ever crashes, even once, the installation is automatically broken until you boot to OS X. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rapoffice Posted February 24, 2006 Author Share Posted February 24, 2006 It just sounds too risky for 6Tb of client data to trust. I am looking at a ten drive hot swap tower with sata port multiplication. Pluses are it all runs native to the mac and speed is huge over giga ethernet. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
onixwj Posted March 8, 2006 Share Posted March 8, 2006 on one occasion I left an HDD mounted more than 24 hours and had no problem. The HDDs were fine when returned to a Mac as well, i.e. they didn't get screwed over in the process.If you mounted them read-only, you'd be assured that they will not change. Also, you can use hdparm to make them spin down after a period of activity, thus reducing power consumption (and, depending on usage, reducing drive wear). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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