G'day to all from Australia, I have a number of rh7.1 boxes with Promise TX2 controller and 4 80 gig Seagate drives running at RAID 0. I use the Promise binary driver and am able to boot from the array with no problem. I have configured these boxes with partitions as shown [pixx@linux_3 projects]$ df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sda8 486M 96M 365M 21% / /dev/sda1 53M 7.4M 43M 15% /boot /dev/sda9 216G 147G 58G 72% /home /dev/sda7 787M 740k 746M 1% /tmp /dev/sda5 1.9G 1.2G 709M 63% /usr My applications use large amounts of scanned aerial images. These images can vary in size from 100 megabytes to 900 megabytes as an individual image. A complete data set may well be 50 gig or more - and i have lots and lots and lots of these hence the huge space reqirements. I am about to order some more of these boxes however need to ask these questions to the list : 1. I have looked at using standard linux software RAID however could not quite get it partitioned the way i want - as in one huge /home partition. I have RAIDED all 4 disks together in the RAID bios level. is there a different way that i need to partition WRT software RAID ? Can someone give me a few dot points to follow please ? 2. On my existing boxes, I have dual processors that are running in uni processor mode ATM cos the Promise binary will only work in single processor mode. Does this problem exist with software RAID ? 3. Has anyone on this list had problems with Samba performance off the linux RAID device ? I am finding my winblows boxes seem to take a while to 'browse' through the Samba share ? I know this is most likely a qustion for the Samba list, but thought i might try and eliminate the RAID device to start with .. 4. Does anyone have any recommendations concerning hardware and/or software that they think might be applicable in this instance ? Thanks in Advance .. Steve
