Hi all, I am planning to build a file server running Gentoo, and before I start buying equipment, I would like to ask if anyone had any experience with a similar setup.
Here's the challenge: I need to provide around 3 TB of disk space with a limited budget. The files I need to store are all HD video frames, typically in SGI format, file size around 8 MB each. The files will be accesed from an SGI IRIX workstations and from one Win2K box. All these have Gigabit ethernet interfaces. Some questions. -I really don' t have the budget to do this with SCSI disks, so I planned to use two 3ware 7500-8 ATA cards and WD 250 GB drives. I would configure the 3wares for RAID-5, this would give me approximately 3.4 TB with 16 drives. I would then like to stripe the two RAID's with Linux software RAID0, hoping this could crank up the perfomance a little bit. Has anyone ever done this ? What would be the best chunk size for the software stripe, knowing that all files will be approximately 8 MB in size? -Which file system would give the best results for this setup (ext3, reiser,xfs ...) ? Is there any way to tweak these files systems for optimal perfomance (8MB files) ? -Any tips to boost network performance ? Any tips for Samba and nfs ? Or is there another network protocol I could try ? -I have an AOpen dual PIII board available with two PIII-800 processors. Would this be enough, or could I have better performances using a newer board (dual Athlon, Xeon, ...) ? -How important is memory (speed, size) for this application? How much should I use ? Any help or ideas greatly appreciated ! -- Karl Huysmans <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
