James Wilkinson wrote:
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?
As I am planning the same thing, I have found that looking at all the
"good" RAID cards will require a new motherboard that can handle PCI-X
based adapters which rate as the fastest. This is an issue for
multimedia that I want to do. Of course, if you look around, you can
purchase hardware to support the RAID card for a reasonable price.
The case is an issue as I want the case to fit within the stereo stand
and allow the addition of drive in the future.
Review of RAID adapters.
http://www.tweakers.net/reviews/557
Some of the cards come with Linux drivers.
At present I am going to use software raid.
--
Robin Laing
