I am using a Gigabyte GA7DXR board with an onboard raid controller Ultra
100 from Promise. Now I would like to connect some old 15 GB disks to
this controller. 2 or 4 disks are possible. On the raid I would like to
have a mysql database with around 5 GB. The system should operate under
linux 2.4. The board is able to run Raid level 0 with 4 or 2 disks and
raid level 1 with 2 disks.
First make sure that your IDE-raid works reliably. I've had problems with
ide-raid under linux in the past. Things may have changed now, but
seriouslydo a thorough filesystem strain test.
It won't be a big problem if the system crashes after a few month. In
general my harddisks were running over years without Raid.
Is it better to take Raid level 1 or 0 ?
If raid level 0, should I use 2 or 4 disks ?
Are both raid-levels running stable in the daily usage ?
Is the performance an really important point to choose a special raid
level ?
Should I use ext2, ext3 or an other filesystem ?
RAID 0 is won't give you much. If you have (2) 15 GB disk, you will now have
a 30 GB disk slightly faster with striping, but you won't notice the
difference with ide-disks.
RAID 1 is mirroring. It's expensive because for every 15 GB disk you have,
you must have another 15 GB disk to mirror it (you can use a smaller disk,
say 10 GB, but your capacity will be 10 GB).
You could use RAID 10. It's a hybrid of RAID 0 and RAID 1. Let's say you
have (4) 15 GB disks. You could use concatenate the first two (RAID 0) to
make a 30 GB, concatenate the other two to make another 30 GB, then you
mirror the first 30GB to the second 30GB. This setup _requires_ a minimum of
4 disks. It's the most expensive, but it offeres the best speed and
reliabilty in case of a failure. If one disk fails, just replace the disk
and your RAID controller should automatically do its business in the
background while your database is chugging away. Whereas RAID-5 you would
have to wait _forever_ for the array to be reconstructed. RAID 10 probably
won't be a specific option for your RAID controller, it will just be called
RAID-1 with striping or something like that.
As for a filesystem. I wouldn't recommend ext2 or ext3 at all. I would
_highly_ recommend a journaling filesystem such as Reiserfs
(http://www.namesys.com) or XFS (http://oss.sgi.com). I've used reiserfs for
a long time, but XFS is growing on me. It seems to be more stable in latest
2.4 kernels.
Cheers,
Andrew Crum
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
-
Before posting, please check:
http://www.mysql.com/manual.php (the manual)
http://lists.mysql.com/ (the list archive)
To request this thread, e-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To unsubscribe, e-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Trouble unsubscribing? Try: http://lists.mysql.com/php/unsubscribe.php
