Liam,
Stay AWAY from Promise RAID controllers. Sure they are the cheapest, but they are hit and miss with Linux.
3Ware is the way to go for Linux compatibility out of the box, embedded Linux kernel support for all distro's of Linux. Can't say that about Promise.
If you haven't already bought the parallel IDE drives, I'll recommend SATA drives with one of these controllers:
http://www.3ware.com/products/serial_ata8000.asp
Or if you already have your parallel ATA IDE drives bought, try this 3ware controller:
http://www.3ware.com/products/parallel_ata.asp
On the topic of RAID configurations, I will recommend RAID 1 for disk mirroring,
http://www.ecs.umass.edu/ece/koren/architecture/Raid/basicRAID.html
To keep costs down, Two 160+Gig drives in a RAID 1 array will give you a redundant 160 Gig of space. On a per Mbyte basis, this is your lowest cost route for redundancy.
Anselm Martin Hoffmeister wrote:
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Am Freitag, 26. November 2004 15:53 schrieb Liam Marshall:
I would like to get a Promise IDE raid controller, either the 4 or 6
channel version, haven't decided yet. I was going to put on it 4 - 80
GB EIDE hard drives with 7200 rpm and 8MB cache each. I would use these
in a raid 0+1 or raid 1+0 configuration. It is my understanding that
this will give me the best of both mirroring for redundancy, and
parity/spanning for performance.
I don't know those well, but you should probably check beforehand wether those are _fully_ supported by Linux. You should also check wether they behave like SCSI controllers to the system (hiding raid details) or the RAID is a software solution - because the latter can be done much cheaper with PCI IDE controllers and LVM. However those IDE controllers mimicking SCSI can give real nice results, especially comparing SCSI price per GB to EIDE.
If I am right in my understanding of raid levels 4 - 80GB drives in such
a configuration will give me 160GB of storage space, with the other
160GB of the drives being used in a mirrored capacity right?
I think that's right. If you have the option money-wise and the controller supports this, you should better choose a RAID-5. Those have parity (redundancy information) scattered over all drives as well, with any single drive being independant. Would make the same security as RAID1+0 or RAID0+1 (It probably does not matter which order those RAIDs are cascaded - try to get a manual of the controller you plan to buy before actually buying and check how it supports what you want), but afaik is a bit faster.... ymmv.
Opinions? Comments?
I am leaning with EIDE solution because of price vis a vis scsi and because sata really isn't available in my area yet and is still fairly expensive/unsupported?
Opinions? Comments?
As it is also a matter of price, I'd choose EIDE as well. SCSI may be faster and nicer :-) but you cannot get 320G scsi for below 800¤ or so. This becomes even more impressive with larger discs, as large EIDE discs are real cheap in comparison.
Anselm -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (GNU/Linux)
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