My one piece of advice, coming from experience, is to buy a hardware
RAID card from a reputable manufacturer, i.e. 3ware, Adaptec, LSI. I
personally recommend 3ware, and have 10+ in various servers here in
the office. The $200-$600 dollars you will spend will be well worth
it if something ever should happen. You can swap out cards, and the
raid array will be recognized, you can swap out drives on the fly,
and they all support the newer RAID 6 for even better redundancy (I
like RAID10, but I am paranoid). 3ware has amazing utilities for
monitoring the array, either via the linux CLI, or via a secure web
interface (nice when you use SSH port forwarding). It will send you
an email when any errors occur (configurable detail levels) so this
helps provide peace of mind. I can't stress how important a dedicated
hardware RAID card is, regardless of the brand.
Just my .02
On Sep 21, 2007, at 11:06 AM, Joshua Baker-LePain wrote:
On Thu, 20 Sep 2007 at 10:58pm, John Bowden wrote
I have a Gygabyte GA-7N400 PRO2 with a 2.6 mHz Athlon cpu. I want
to set up a
central file storage for 2/3 users using 6/7 machines. A mixture
of win2k, XP
and various Linux distros (my home network). It will be used to
store files,
(docs, music and DVD ) for all of these machines, print server, (two
ink-jets), mail server and later on a myth tv set up. Would SAMBA
be the
best option for the file and print serving ?
Samba for file serving, CUPS for print serving -- both Win2K and XP
can handle IPP.
The mother board has 2 X IDE channels, 2 X IDE channels with raid
and 2 X SATA
raid channels, that's up to 10 hard drive devices. The IDE raid
chip is a
GigaRaid IT8212F chipset. It supports raid 0 or raid 1 and raid 0
+ 1 and
JBOD. The SATA raid is a Silicon Image Sil3512. It supports Raid 0
or 1.
Would I get better speed performance using the chips to manage the
raid or
using software raid?
Without digging out the specs of those cards, I'd lean heavily
towards software RAID, mainly for ease of management and
compatibility.
--
Joshua Baker-LePain
QB3 Shared Cluster Sysadmin
UCSF
_______________________________________________
CentOS mailing list
CentOS@xxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
_______________________________________________
CentOS mailing list
CentOS@xxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
