Re: RAID recommendations?

[David Greaves <david@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

If it's a dedicated box for personal use as a server then consider linux
and sw raid.

You get excellent managment (mdadm or EVMS), great performance and you
can use commodity (none-accelerated) cards, mix IDE, SATA (and, god
forbid, even USB or remote drives in a push!). RAID 0,1,5,6,10 and many
other combinations.

You can run Samba to share with other systems and have excellent
web-based admin.

A big benefit over HW raid is that if the card dies in a couple (or 5)
years and is not made anymore then you're not toasted! (and this happens
more than you may expect!). You can also migrate over to larger drives
and/or faster controller cards. You can upgrade the motherboard
underneath to say an AMD64 with whatever super IO exists in a few years
and it will all just carry on working.

I run a 1.2Tb raid5 system with 6x250Gb SATA and a 250Gb PATA as a hot
spare (started life as a 4 disk PATA BTW). It runs on an old 1200Mhz
machine and provides plenty of performance for editing multi-Gb video
files whilst reading and writing multiple TV programmes.

Sure I couldn't run a cable head-end from it but!!!

If you want to know more then just ask.

David


Paul Gordon wrote:

> Is anyone actually using an IDE or SATA RAID card?
>
> Looking around, I see an increasing number of choices appearing now, -
> many more cards support more advanced RAID modes than was the case a
> year or so ago, and prices seem to have dropped quite a bit as well.
>
> Knowing that my DVD server is going to run out of storage in a few
> months, I'm intending to rebuild my whole storage solution, and this
> time I plan to do it "properly"
>
> a NAS solution like the Buffalo Terrastation will be in the running as
> well, but I also want to look at a traditional storage server as well,
> - since I think this may offer me more flexibility...
>
> So I am looking for personal recommendations for RAID controllers...
>
> - I'll consider either IDE or SATA - but I'd prefer to make the switch
> to SATA now... (or SATA-2 for that matter)
> - I'll consider either PCI or PCIe cards, - PCIe would require
> purchasing a new motherboard as well to support it, but if that's what
> it takes, then so be it...
> - I'd prefer cards that support at least 4 drives, more are fine, but
> don't wan't to use 2-port SATA cards really...
> - Not too bothered about the price (shock!) - I'm prepared to pay good
> money if the features, quality & reliability justifies it, - but
> within limits... - above £200-£300 is probably getting into silly
> money territory for this excercise...
> - RAID 5 support is a must.
> - Controllers that allow for array expansion in the future would be
> preferred, - either by upgrading to larger drives, or by allowing an
> array to span across more than 1 card... (although an 8-port card will
> probably see me right for quite a while!)
> - Hot spare support would be nice, but not essential, - if/when a
> drive fails, I don't have a problem having to replace it myself...
>
>
> Also looking for recommendations for hot-pluggable SATA caddies....
>
> Note, - I've already searched around and found plenty of controllers
> that I could choose, - what I am after now is personal experiences and
> recommendations...
>
> TIA
>
> Paul G.
>
>
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>
>
>
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