[CentOS] Serial ATA hardware raid.

[Franki]

Bryan J. Smith wrote:
> From:  Franki 
> 
>>The 3ware 9500 goes for $1023 AUD.
>>once I add some fast drives to that this thing is starting to look like an expensive upgrade.
> 
> 
> RAID-5 is only ideal for lots of contiguous reads or disk storage efficiency.
> If you have more writes, or more random reads, then RAID-0+1 is better.
> Then the 8506 does nice for less.
> 

Wow, thats a wealth of Info you have there, thankyou for the crash 
course :-)

After abit of searching, I found a 4 port 8506 for retail $480 here:
http://www.qldpcs.com.au/inc.php?inc=products&mcatid=3&scatid=78&catid=86

I might give them a call and ask if they do wholesale as well.
They are in queensland, which is still 5000km away, but I shipped most 
of 20,000 dollars in laptops from over there last month so I guess it 
isn't that big of a deal.

For the record, this machine is to replace a web server with about 60+ 
domains hosted, some of which get allot of hits, most are dynamic 
(Perl/PHP/Java) and the server runs local MySQL/PostgreSQL as well..
I don't think speed is as important as redundancy, but having said that, 
for future proofing, I'd like to get a good performer as well.

Which brings up another question, I was looking at populating this thing 
with 10,000 RPM 8MB cache 40gig (roughly) drives, but the only drives I 
see in my pricelists that match those specs are Western Digital 
Wd360GB's and I generally have stayed away from WD drives in the past 
due to dodgy standards implimentations and the problems that can cause 
with Linux, should I continue to stay away?

Actually, now that I think about it, I guess 10,000 rpm drives with raid 
is probably over kill for my usage, but they are pretty cheap anyway, 
(149 AUD each) but if WD are still dodgy then I'd probably go for 
7200rpm seagates as I can get the 8MB 80gig 7200rpm drives for $85 AUD.

Are Western Digitals still dodgy?

rgds

Franki