Take a look at the ASUS 7500 server, www.Asus.com.tw, or www.asus.com. To
that, add your CPUs, RAM, and Asus PCI DA2200 raid controller. We have two
of these units and really like them, priced out a lot cheaper than the
equivalent Dell 4300. The 2200 controller supports 80 megabytes/sec LVD
drives, like the units from IBM.
Use the DA2200 raid card (128 megs disk hardware cache, where you pick up a
lot of performance) for disk work only (the machine has 2 hotswap LVD
backplanes of 4 drawers each, which can run as 8 drawers or as 2 x 4 drawer
indepedent raid systems).
Run your non-disk periphs off the on-board 7890 adaptec controller,
including a small scsi disk for your www, Imail log, SQL log, etc files,
keeping that traffic off the RAID5 channel.
The mobo has an Intel 10/100 on board, so just add another via PCI if you
need two nics. We find intel to be a much more responsive supplier, better
web site, and better value/money.
You really don't want to run the RAID 18 megabytes as one partition. I'd
recommend at least 3 partitions: system (boot and OS), programs, and data.
Executive Software's Diskeeper recognizes RAID and knows how to defragment
RAID. I figure with all the mailboxes and file attachements coming and
going on Imail server, disk fragmentation of the data partition must get
pretty horrendous.
Len
>Hello all,
>
>Im just about to build a new Web & Mail server, spec:
>
>Dual Pentium III 500
>Motherboard with O/B SCSI
>384MB RAM
>3 x 9GB 10k RPM SCSI drives
>Adaptec 133 RAID card
>Dual 3COM NICs
>SCSI CDROM & Tape Drive
>
>My idea is to hang the CDROM and Tape Drive off the O/B SCSI and set the
>disks up as RAID5 with one big partition. Is this the best way to go for
>performance? Any ideas appreciated ...
>
>regards
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