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