Hi,
I am thinking about setting up a software RAID 5 system on a system to
be used as a NAS. I am planning to put 4 80GB HDDs on a celeron 366 system
and then connecting that system to my main computers through a 100Mbps LAN
connection. There are going to be 2 systems connected to this system, so I
am thinking about putting 2 100M lan cards on this system, and adding a IDE
controller/Software RAID controller card to handle the drives. The celeron
366 system has 128kb cache and the system has 128mb main memory.
Is the celeron 366 is going to be fast enough for this system, and what kind
of performence I can expect if I need to use this external RAID system as
the main storage device for my client computers. Should I put more ram on
that computer to increase performence.
Is a 100M lan connection going to be enough, or is it going to choke up or
will my system not be able to keep up with HDD speed. I am also wondering if
using 7200rpm disks would make sense. These hard drives eat up a lot of
power and they tend to require a lot of cooling. I have 2 80GB Seagate
baracudda disks that are causing me quite a bit of headaches already with
their heat output.
I am planning to run Linux or FreeBSD on the RAID system and connecting it
to main systems running Windows 2000/XP. Will samba work w/o problems when
connected to win2k or winxp machines?
Do I need to get expensive LAN cards like Intel or 3Com ones or will cheap
Dlink/Compex ones do? I will not have more than 3 client computers. So I
will put 1 lan card on the storage system for each client system.
Also what filesystem should I use for the hard disk. I would like to create
a single partition for the whole RAID array and then create seperate shares
with quotas inside that to be shared over the network.
In any case I will be trying this out and checking out the performence. I
will also try to set up the RAID on one of the windows client machines to
see if it performs better as a local setup or as a remote setup. I will be
using this setup mainly as a backup and to perform calculations on large
datasets. I won't be running databases on the RAID system, but would not
like to end up with something that has real bad performence too ;)
Ambar Roy
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