[CentOS] [OT] External RAID storage / NAS

[Les Mikesell]

Feizhou wrote:
>>
>> How stringent is your requirement that this be external storage?
> 
> i don't know...the OP did not say much about space in his case.
> 
>>
>> My home server (currently at 1.25TB) is using a Super Micro SATA
>> hot-swap drive cage.  Five drives take up three bays in a mini-server
>> tower (case has a total of 9 bays).  I have another cage installed,
>> but no controller for it as of yet.  I have 4 of the 5 drives
>> connected to onboard SATA and one connected to a pci sata controller.
>> The boot drive is PATA, and the cdrom is external usb2.  Hot-swap
>> seems to work ... although I haven't tried to remove a drive hot, I
>> have added two.  With a custom kernel and recompiling some tools, you
>> can add hot-growable soft-RAID5 support to Centos, or if you have the
>> funding, a hardware raid controller would be awesome.
> 
> hardware raid that comes with bbu cache for that matter.
> 
> if you can hot add two sata drives, you should be able to hot remove 
> sata drives too. at least on opensolaris that was very easy to do. just 
> unplug or poweroff. i suspect centos 5 to be very simple on this point. 
> not sure about centos 4.

The recent 4.5 release should have fixed this if it wasn't handled in 
earlier centos 4 versions.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com