Hello, We recently purchased a Dell PowerEdge 4400 server with a Perc3/di RAID controller. It arrived this week (after cough 3 _months_ of hassling over the order with Dell!!!) and I'm now setting it up. We have the system with five drives total. Two are 9Gb and three are 36Gb. The two 9Gb drives are in a RAID1 setup and the three 36Gb drives are in a RAID5. The mirrored drives had Linux preinstalled from Dell on them and I think I'm going to pretty much leave them as they are (except I deleted over half the unnecessary packages they installed). However, I'm not quite sure how to setup my RAID5 partitions. This server will be used primarly as an internet server and will house web pages, ftp sites and a MySQL database. So I have several questions about setting up stuff on the RAID5 portion: 1) Dell configured the server with swap on the two 9Gb drives. My feeling would be that I would get better performance by moving it to the RAID 5 devices since there won't be the mirrored disk I/O. Should I do this? 2) Given our uses of this server, we will predominantly be dealing with many small files (for the web pages) and some potentially larger ones for the databases. Also, some of the web pages contain about 10Gb of rather larger Quicktime training movies. Am I best off creating one large partition with the defaults of mke2fs or creating 3 or 4 partitions and tuning some of the mke2fs parameters? 3) If the answer is creating multiple partitions, what are some good modifications to make when I run mke2fs for say 1) a web page parition (many small files) , 2) a movie partition (many big files), and 3) a database system. On a slightly different but related note, we purchased this server with the Perc3/di RAID option, intending to use the first channel for the mirrored boot drives and the second channel for the RAID 5 drives. Today, I discovered that the backplane that houses the drives is connected to one and only one channel and there's no way to internally run more than one RAID channel. Is running everything off the same channel a big no-no? Obviously, to get the best performance, I'd prefer to have each RAID device on a separate channel but it doesn't look like that is possible with the PowerEdge 4400 without buying an external enclosure. I think its a bit misleading of Dell to ship a dual channel RAID controller but only make it possible for one channel to be used with the server as it ships. Anyone have any ideas to get around this seeming limitation? Thanks, Kevin -- Kevin M. Myer Systems Administrator Lancaster-Lebanon Intermediate Unit 13 (717)-560-6140
