IDE controller card and Fedora Core 3

[Ow Mun Heng]

On Mon, 2004-12-06 at 12:11, John Summerfield wrote:
> On Monday 06 December 2004 11:12, Langdon Stevenson wrote:

> > I want to build a RAID 5 array for data integrity.  I have four 160Gig
> > Western digital hard drives, and a couple of spare IDE controller cards
> > that I would like to use.  The controller cards are the issue.
> 
> I wonder whether you're going to more trouble than it's worth; a Pentium II 
> 400 has heaps of power for the typical small office, but it's old and not the 
> hardware base I'd expect someone to choose for a high-availability system.

400Mhz , to me is already mroe than enough power under the hood to serve
as a file-server.

Remember, being a file-server, the necessary requirement is a fast disk
and lots of memory. (smbd spawns ~2MB per connection)

I run mine on 3x 200GB PII 300Mhz w 512MB ram. Been serving the dept
nicely. 

I don't do raid, but I do keep a backup server handy that rsyncs every
night.

> If you really want RAID with lots of disks, I think you should be buying a new 
> small SCSI server. Dell, IBM and Sun all have such systems, and in some cases 
> with Linux preinstalled.

If I were you, I'll get a whitebox instead. Unless you're willing to pay
a premium for Next_business_day etc... and SCSI, then whitebox will do
find. TM anyway


> 
> If you wish to persist with this system, then install one )not two) drive per 
> ATA connector, and use skinny cables. With the standard wide cables you are 
> going to have ventilation problems.

I've got 2 fans sucking air out of the case, and 1 blowing straight onto
the 3 HDs.

> With your Pentium II, disk performance may be an issue. I find individual 
> disks mostly run at twice the speed in my Athlon 1400 that they do in my 
> Pentium IIs. I had a couple of drives in a Pentium II running about 23 
> Mbytes/sec but I get 40 and up in the Athlon, and the latest drives better 
> 50.
/sbin/hdparm -tT /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
 Timing buffer-cache reads:   128 MB in  1.50 seconds = 85.33 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  64 MB in  2.62 seconds = 24.43 MB/sec

It's old Hardware running on IDE. It's expected. Not Too Shabby though.
(On a 10mbps lan)