Re: Cheapest way to acheive RAID5 ?

[Ian Oliver <lists@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

In article <VPOP31.5.0g.20050413083235.311.145.1.6c398647@rolecgroup>,
Dean
Barrett wrote:
> Has one got any advice on this type of thing ? - i assume i shall have
to
> scrap my Shuttle to get 5 drives in a box, i also assume i'll need a
bigger
> PSU etc.

Here is my approach -
Scrounge old PII 233MHz with 196MB of RAM from work. Free as it was in the
skip pile.
Add a Promise 4xATA card (100 TX2?) to handle big disks. £5 ish from eBay.
Fit three new Maxtor 160G drives from Ebuyer into the 5.25" drive bays
with
bay coolers fitted (off eBay again).  Cool drives are happy drives!
Install Debian Sarge and setup 3 small partitions at the start of each
drive
(1G is *plenty* enough) and three big data partitions. Use 2 of the small
ones for a Raid 1 (mirror) for boot/root, the other small as swap, and the
three big partitions as a raid 5. Debian will let you do all of this at
install time!
Install Debian in a very cut down form and then add sshd, samba and a few
others bits and bobs.
Administer it via ssh and use samba to make the data available to all the
machines in the house.

I also use this machine for my whole house DNS/DHCP and to serve music to
my
Dell audio players.

It may sound complex, but it's fun!  This was my very 1st ever Linux
install.
I did it once to see how it all worked, made copious notes, found which
bits
I needed and which I didn't, and they wiped it all and did it again from
scratch.

This box now sits in a corner with neither monitor nor HD. I backup
individual files to DVD about once per month. Only 5-6 DVDs worth get added
per month.

Ian Oliver
Sunny Leeds, UK
Using Java on Tini for control via Dallas 1-wire