SATA vs SCSCI RAID and LINUX

[Mark Susol | Ultimate Creative Media]

Well I'm pretty much sold on SCSI on my next server after researching it
more. Conscensus is IDE/SATA for desktop : SCSI for server.

I also have heard more suggestions for Linux and SuperMicro. So here's my
wish list for the next server. The 2nd one is a dual processor so I'm
thinking that's what I need for "entry" level server equipment running
Fedora or SuSe
Supermicro 5013S-8 (RAID 1) or Supermicro 6013P-8 (RAID 5)

I just had a really bad experience with a hosting appliance (EnsimPro3.7 on
FC1) on a 1U server with dual IDE drives. I'm still not sure what the
rootcause of the problem was, but basically the first 2nd HD I had went
corrupt (bad sectors) after a month, and then the 2nd one was giving dma
time out errors (inodes took the drive offline) so basically my virtual
hosting went down and the drive just never got a break.

I hacked the Ensim appliance off of the primary drive and brought the server
backup running my 100GB/month site as a real server and the primary IDE
drive is doing fine (knock on silicon) with server load < 0.5 during peak.
I'm still afraid to mount the slave IDE drive though. I even moved it to the
second IDE channel since the drives were slightly different (seagate 100 vs
maxtor 133) hoping they weren't interrupting each other on the same channel.

Now there was some discussion on Ensim forums about ext3 & quotas hanging
the server under Ensim with 2.4.22 kernel. Some said 2.4.26 kernel solved
their problems. I'm not sure how to know if this was causing the server to
hang on me..but I was having dma errors with the drives.

I think I'm going to go with WebMin for server management unless there are
some other suggestions that don't cost $2000. I really like the idea of a
"virtual" server where one doesn't take down the other and basically the box
stays up. Not sure how this works with a RAID setup?

And of course..want Fedora or SuSe involved.

Mark Susol
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