[K12OSN] Hard Drive Conundrum

[Brian Chase]

Check 3ware for IDE raid solutions with built-into-the-kernel 
compatibility for Linux, so Linux sees Raid array as single hard drive 
on install.

I have several RAID cards and they are well renowned in the Linux 
community for good Linux support.

Liam Marshall wrote:

> Liam Marshall wrote:
>
>> Liam Marshall wrote:
>>
>>> I am contemplating a hard drive switch.  Here is the current 
>>> configuration
>>>
>>> cheap 2 gb ide drive primary master with /boot residing on it
>>> cheap 52x cdrom secondary master
>>>
>>> Adaptec 2940U2/UW scsi controller
>>>
>>> cheap old and slow seagate ST318418N  7200 rpm 18 gb scsi drive  
>>> identified as sda with /home    /opt   and the swap on it
>>>
>>> cheap old and slow ibm DDRs-3913OD 7200 rpm with /root and all else 
>>> linux on it
>>>
>>> K12LTSP 4.0? on it.  (haven't gone to 4.1 during the school year out 
>>> of fear of losing all that is currently setup on it ie users, 
>>> software etc.)
>>>
>>> I want to explore different had drives to get more storage space and 
>>> speed.  before I can do that however I need to know a few things
>>>
>>> 1.  I thought putting /home /opt and /swap on a different drive was 
>>> a good thing, performance wise.  Was I wrong?  should I try to keep 
>>> everything on one drive or keep things separate?  would I lose 
>>> performance, in otherwords, if I get a single, larger drive to 
>>> replace the 2 I currently use?
>>>
>>> 2.  How would I go about copying the drive's partitions to the new 
>>> drive(s)  as the partitions are currently separated across multiple 
>>> drives I can't just clone the drives, which I know how to do in the 
>>> windoze world but not in linux anyway.
>>>
>>> 3.  I am wondering whether to stick with scsi or go EIDE.  I am 
>>> assuming that if I get even EIDE drives with a much higher rpm speed 
>>> than my slow scsi drives that I will see something of a performance 
>>> increase, even if I am "downgrading" to EIDE from scsi?
>>>
>>> 4.  can I do some form of raid with EIDE?  I assume I would need a 
>>> controller card for this.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> help greatly appreciated
>>>
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>>>
>> I also need a ide raid controller recommendation that we know works 
>> with linux.
>>
>> correct me if I am wrong but most should as the raid work is done 
>> before linux is involved, right?  I mean, I played with a cheap dell 
>> system that had a 2 drive ide configuration attached to a raid 
>> controller card and during the installation of K12LTSP 4.0 it 
>> detected only 1 drive
>>
> what ide raid level would be best for both redundancy and 
> performance?  is that raid 0+1?  and would any raid controller do that?
>
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