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