On Friday 21 September 2007 16:39:46 Von Landfried wrote: > 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 > > _______________________________________________ > > CentOS mailing list > > CentOS at centos.org > > http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos > > _______________________________________________ > CentOS mailing list > CentOS at centos.org > http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos A bit out of my price range for a home file server, but I will keep an eye out at the computer fair I attend. -- Guy Fawkes, the only man to enter the house's of Parliament with honest intentions, (he was going to blow them up!) Registered Linux user number 414240