On Mon, 2004-12-06 at 12:11, John Summerfield wrote: > On Monday 06 December 2004 11:12, Langdon Stevenson wrote: > > I want to build a RAID 5 array for data integrity. I have four 160Gig > > Western digital hard drives, and a couple of spare IDE controller cards > > that I would like to use. The controller cards are the issue. > > I wonder whether you're going to more trouble than it's worth; a Pentium II > 400 has heaps of power for the typical small office, but it's old and not the > hardware base I'd expect someone to choose for a high-availability system. 400Mhz , to me is already mroe than enough power under the hood to serve as a file-server. Remember, being a file-server, the necessary requirement is a fast disk and lots of memory. (smbd spawns ~2MB per connection) I run mine on 3x 200GB PII 300Mhz w 512MB ram. Been serving the dept nicely. I don't do raid, but I do keep a backup server handy that rsyncs every night. > If you really want RAID with lots of disks, I think you should be buying a new > small SCSI server. Dell, IBM and Sun all have such systems, and in some cases > with Linux preinstalled. If I were you, I'll get a whitebox instead. Unless you're willing to pay a premium for Next_business_day etc... and SCSI, then whitebox will do find. TM anyway > > If you wish to persist with this system, then install one )not two) drive per > ATA connector, and use skinny cables. With the standard wide cables you are > going to have ventilation problems. I've got 2 fans sucking air out of the case, and 1 blowing straight onto the 3 HDs. > With your Pentium II, disk performance may be an issue. I find individual > disks mostly run at twice the speed in my Athlon 1400 that they do in my > Pentium IIs. I had a couple of drives in a Pentium II running about 23 > Mbytes/sec but I get 40 and up in the Athlon, and the latest drives better > 50. /sbin/hdparm -tT /dev/hda /dev/hda: Timing buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 1.50 seconds = 85.33 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 2.62 seconds = 24.43 MB/sec It's old Hardware running on IDE. It's expected. Not Too Shabby though. (On a 10mbps lan)
