Paul Crossman wrote: > I'm about to reuse some old hardware to create a sizable RAID storage server > at home to get all the data I care about in one place and protected. The > hardware I'm going to use is an old P3 500MHz system I have which has an > A-Bit BE6 motherboard and 256 MB of RAM in it. If I don't have to replace > the motherboard that would be great, but if I must, I must. > > I'm planning on running FC3 or FC4 on this box using two 40GB IDE drives > which will be software RAID1. Also, I will be upgrading the RAM to 512MB. OK: I assume that "reliability" is going to be a major factor. (Some Abit boards of that age have had capacitor leaks: be warned.) You know there'll probably be issues upgrading memory much further. Is speed important to you? What sort of network connection are you planning on getting? If you're limiting yourself to 100 base TX [1], then that's going to be your limiting factor. For most data (especially Oggs and the like), that's plenty. If you're planning on gigabit Ethernet, remember that data is going to have to come off the hard drives, through the PCI bus, be encoded, and then go back through the same PCI bus to get to the network (given the motherboard in question). I'd expect something in the region of 40 MByte/s throughput if everything goes well. Plain PCI isn't enough for gigabit ethernet speeds when that's the only thing on the bus. > I'd also like some recommendations on a good SATA RAID controller to use > here. I was going to use the 3ware 9500S 8 port controller, but it's PCI64 > and I don't think the A-Bit motherboard supports that, but if I have to get > a new Motherboard, then so be it. Can someone recommend a good SATA RAID > controller that supports RAID 0/1/10/5/JBOD and has full, on the fly, hot > swap drive support? You should know about http://linux.yyz.us/sata/faq-sata-raid.html , and check http://linux.yyz.us/sata/sata-status.html and http://linux.yyz.us/sata/software-status.html . The latter says that Linux libata does not yet support hot-swap: that rules out a *lot* of hardware. Otherwise, I would expect the Pentium 3 to be able to handle soft RAID as well as this card handles RAID: you might find that using a cheaper SATA adapter (or two) and soft RAID does the job as well. A PCI64 card *should* work in a 32 bit slot, if there isn't anything physically in the way. The "Updated Motherboard compatibility list" available from http://3ware.com/support/index.asp lists a lot of (newer) motherboards and says to use the 32 bit 33 MHz PCI slots they provide. One thing to watch out for: I have found that there are some modern PCI cards that won't work in BX motherboards. (A PCI Radeon 9250, for example). But I have no experience with the 3ware card. > I also know that I'm going to need a new power supply to handle 7 disk > drives, so I'll be replacing the 200W unit with 400W one. Will this fry my > motherboard at all, or does it not matter? Shouldn't matter. If it does, then it was time to replace the motherboard anyway: its power circuits were dodgy. Hope this helps, James. [1] 100 Mbit/s? Slow? -- E-mail address: james | ... more holes in Internet Explorer than @westexe.demon.co.uk | Blackburn, Lancashire... | -- http://theinquirer.net/?article=17235
