[CentOS] Central file server advice please

[Von Landfried]

My one piece of advice, coming from experience, is to buy a hardware  
RAID card from a reputable manufacturer, i.e. 3ware, Adaptec, LSI. I  
personally recommend 3ware, and have 10+ in various servers here in  
the office. The $200-$600 dollars you will spend will be well worth  
it if something ever should happen. You can swap out cards, and the  
raid array will be recognized, you can swap out drives on the fly,  
and they all support the newer RAID 6 for even better redundancy (I  
like RAID10, but I am paranoid). 3ware has amazing utilities for  
monitoring the array, either via the linux CLI, or via a secure web  
interface (nice when you use SSH port forwarding). It will send you  
an email when any errors occur (configurable detail levels) so this  
helps provide peace of mind. I can't stress how important a dedicated  
hardware RAID card is, regardless of the brand.

Just my .02


On Sep 21, 2007, at 11:06 AM, Joshua Baker-LePain wrote:

> On Thu, 20 Sep 2007 at 10:58pm, John Bowden wrote
>
>> I have a Gygabyte GA-7N400 PRO2 with a 2.6 mHz Athlon cpu. I want  
>> to set up a
>> central file storage for 2/3 users using 6/7 machines. A mixture  
>> of win2k, XP
>> and various Linux distros (my home network). It will be used to  
>> store files,
>> (docs, music and DVD ) for all of these machines, print server, (two
>> ink-jets), mail server and later on  a myth tv set up. Would SAMBA  
>> be the
>> best option for the file and print serving ?
>
> Samba for file serving, CUPS for print serving -- both Win2K and XP  
> can handle IPP.
>
>> The mother board has 2 X IDE channels, 2 X IDE channels with raid  
>> and 2 X SATA
>> raid channels, that's up to 10 hard drive devices. The IDE raid  
>> chip is a
>> GigaRaid IT8212F chipset. It supports raid 0 or raid 1 and raid 0  
>> + 1 and
>> JBOD. The SATA raid is a Silicon Image Sil3512. It supports Raid 0  
>> or 1.
>> Would I get better speed performance using the chips to manage the  
>> raid or
>> using software raid?
>
> Without digging out the specs of those cards, I'd lean heavily  
> towards software RAID, mainly for ease of management and  
> compatibility.
>
> -- 
> Joshua Baker-LePain
> QB3 Shared Cluster Sysadmin
> UCSF
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