David A. Woyciesjes spake the following on 3/29/2007 6:29 AM:
Dave wrote:
Hello, I've got a 4.4 box that i'd like to implement software raid on. Does anyone have any experiences with this? Thanks. Dave.
I'm going to be setting up a machine at home, for keeping backupcopies of my data & software. For various reasons (work being one) the "server" is going to be a dual boot W2K/Linux machine, and I'll have MacOSX, W2K, and Linux clients accessing this over the network. I'll probably just fire up NFS for this. I have a 60GB drive, and 2 80GB drives for it. I'll be adding in a Rosewill RC-200 PCI ATA/133 card for the 80GB drives. It says it does RAID, but that is probably one of those fake-RAID deals. Anybody use this card? Since it's likely not real RAID, my plan is to have on 80GB drive formatted as ext3, then use rsync daily to back that up to the other 80GB drive. Then I can use something like EXT2 IFS (from fs-driver.org) in W2K if/when I need to access the backup drives. I thought about a software RAID1 in Linux ext3 format, but the EXT2IFS driver probably wouldn't be able to read that, right? Then, to make things interesting, I have an external 300GB drive with NTFS format. This contains the portable copy of the data store. :) Not too much of an issue, since Linux can read NTFS fine. Or am I wrong here? Should I flip this to Ext3, considering my other thoughts on this setup?
The best common denominator would be fat32 on the external. Linux, Windows, and I think even the Macs can read and write to it. The biggest limit to fat32 is the maximum of 2 gig file sizes. Have you thought about just looking for an old PII PC in a garage sale and just making it a server? You could use something as simple as Freenas and make it a network storage point.