| 1 |
On Tue, 2006-01-31 at 21:47 -0700, JD Gray wrote: |
| 2 |
> I'm going to be purchasing some hard drives for a raid5 array. |
| 3 |
Better plan in a hotspare - the last batch of 160G disks I bought is |
| 4 |
dying at an alarming rate. |
| 5 |
|
| 6 |
> I'll be |
| 7 |
> running them out of my gentoo fileserver. I've used md in the past for |
| 8 |
> raid0, but I know it's not a very robust solution as far as partition |
| 9 |
> resizing and the like. What do you suggest for a good raid solution? |
| 10 |
linux md for raid5, with lvm if you want. |
| 11 |
I get about 1% processor load on an athlon64 (and ~35% on a 500Mhz P3!) |
| 12 |
at "full speed", it's really nice. |
| 13 |
|
| 14 |
> I |
| 15 |
> haven't decided on an interface, though I'm seriously considering a |
| 16 |
> buying a SATA controller and going with that, but I could also use the |
| 17 |
> raid controller that's built on to my motherboard. |
| 18 |
Nooooo! ;-) |
| 19 |
Better use the linux md driver and use the disks directly. Less b0rkage, |
| 20 |
more speed. |
| 21 |
I've had quite good experiences with Promise TX2/TX4 controllers, but |
| 22 |
opinions differ wildly on this thing. |
| 23 |
> Thanks in advance |
| 24 |
> for the help. I think I want to go with software raid simply because I |
| 25 |
> will be able to transfer the raid to another machine when I decided to |
| 26 |
> upgrade that box. |
| 27 |
And if something breaks you can replace it, even migrating the whole |
| 28 |
array at once to another box (I did that, only needed a new kernel, but |
| 29 |
after boot *plop* raid back) |
| 30 |
|
| 31 |
I suggest you also think about failure-related problems - what if a disk |
| 32 |
dies? |
| 33 |
What if 4 out of 8 disks die within an hour? (I've seen that) |
| 34 |
|
| 35 |
Hmmm ... I hope I'm not scaring you :-) |
| 36 |
Good luck, |
| 37 |
|
| 38 |
Patrick |
| 39 |
-- |
| 40 |
Stand still, and let the rest of the universe move |
Archives