From: Les Mikesell lesmikesell@gmail.com

Note that software mirroring has some advantages too and is not a big performance hit as long as the underlying hardware uses DMA and works independently (i.e. don't do it with drives on the same IDE controller cable).

Actually, I wouldn't do it on the same PCI bus. With drives able to burst at 50MBps, the amount of traffic on your interconnect can actually be high.

I consider it a big plus to be able to take a drive from a mirrored pair, plug it into just about any computer without worrying about having exactly the same brand of controller, and recover the data - or take over the service the broken computer was providing.

Then you'll like 3Ware. For RAID-1, it doesn't change the organization.

But even if you use RAID-0, 0+1 and RAID-5, the great thing about 3Ware is you _can_ safely move the drives to _any_ model card, as long as the firmware is at least the same or newer. I have done this with volumes from 5000 to 6000 or 7000, 6000 to 7000.

And by the way, there's nothing wrong with running a DNS server and mail server on the same machine - but you should have a 2nd dns server which can also provide other services.

A secondary mail server is always a good idea too. Ideally, you should consider a chroot environment or even an UML instance for each.

You might need a bit more RAM but DNS typically is not a big cpu load.

But you are correct from a load standpoint, neither will hit you too much.

-- Bryan J. Smith mailto:b.j.smith@ieee.org