Hi
we are skating on the edge of being too low on hard drive space. With careful management of the ltsp environment I think we could make do but there are several reasons I don't want to.
1. First, in most cases I am a believer in more is better, hardware wise. What we have for hard drive space is 27 GB total.
2. Our current hard drives are composed of old, slow (5400 rpm, cache ?) scsi harddrives 1 9GB IBM and 1 18GB Seagate. They are both hooked in through a decent but non raid adaptec controller with no upgrade path for it
3. With our current setup we have zero redundancy. I have /home and /opt as well as the swap partition on the 18GB seagate and /root and the rest on the 9GB IBM. If either goes down I am well and truly screwed. and deservedly so with no redundancy. But I wanted to prove the LTSP idea to the school and did so by creating the server out of mostly used parts. Money will forever be the ban of school computer labs!
Anyway, long story short. The board is impressed enough to spring loose some money for hard drive upgrade, maybe over the Christmas holiday.
I was considering the following in an effort to save some money. Let me know what you think of this setup. Remember that the current setup up I am using is old slow scsi drives and that it is working sufficiently well performance wise
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.
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?
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?
If you believe Seagate then putting more than 1 IDE disk in a box will cause failures. WD raptor disks are enterprise grade and can be doubled.
So 3 80G WD raptors should give good performance, good raid 5, and not be an issue with multiple (noisy) disks. If you use 3, do get 4 disks as one failure is all you can tolerate without tears. I'd like to know how it works, if you go this route.
James.
http://www.seagate.com/content/docs/pdf/whitepaper/D2c_More_than_Interface_ATA_vs_SCSI_042003.pdf
That's a great article.
They make some excellent points about the vibrational design considerations between SCSI and EIDE drives in different intended environments. But at the end of the article they mention that their EIDE personal computer level hard drives experienced a wide range of performance depending upon the case used.
I would infer from this that selecting a high quality case will go a long ways in letting you "get away" with the use of a non-enterprise EIDE drive. I would hope that the school that is willing to pay for a drive upgrade recognizes the importance of a high quality case.
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