Hi > we are skating on the edge of being too low on hard drive space. With > careful management of the ltsp environment I think we could make do but > there are several reasons I don't want to. > > 1. First, in most cases I am a believer in more is better, hardware > wise. What we have for hard drive space is 27 GB total. > > 2. Our current hard drives are composed of old, slow (5400 rpm, cache > ?) scsi harddrives 1 9GB IBM and 1 18GB Seagate. They are both hooked > in through a decent but non raid adaptec controller with no upgrade path > for it > > 3. With our current setup we have zero redundancy. I have /home and > /opt as well as the swap partition on the 18GB seagate and /root and the > rest on the 9GB IBM. If either goes down I am well and truly screwed. > and deservedly so with no redundancy. But I wanted to prove the LTSP > idea to the school and did so by creating the server out of mostly used > parts. Money will forever be the ban of school computer labs! > > Anyway, long story short. The board is impressed enough to spring loose > some money for hard drive upgrade, maybe over the Christmas holiday. > > I was considering the following in an effort to save some money. Let me > know what you think of this setup. Remember that the current setup up I > am using is old slow scsi drives and that it is working sufficiently > well performance wise > > > I would like to get a Promise IDE raid controller, either the 4 or 6 > channel version, haven't decided yet. I was going to put on it 4 - 80 > GB EIDE hard drives with 7200 rpm and 8MB cache each. I would use these > in a raid 0+1 or raid 1+0 configuration. It is my understanding that > this will give me the best of both mirroring for redundancy, and > parity/spanning for performance. > > If I am right in my understanding of raid levels 4 - 80GB drives in such > a configuration will give me 160GB of storage space, with the other > 160GB of the drives being used in a mirrored capacity right? > > Opinions? Comments? > > I am leaning with EIDE solution because of price vis a vis scsi and > because sata really isn't available in my area yet and is still fairly > expensive/unsupported?
If you believe Seagate then putting more than 1 IDE disk in a box will cause failures. WD raptor disks are enterprise grade and can be doubled. So 3 80G WD raptors should give good performance, good raid 5, and not be an issue with multiple (noisy) disks. If you use 3, do get 4 disks as one failure is all you can tolerate without tears. I'd like to know how it works, if you go this route. James. http://www.seagate.com/content/docs/pdf/whitepaper/D2c_More_than_Interface_ATA_vs_SCSI_042003.pdf ------------------------------------------------------- SF email is sponsored by - The IT Product Guide Read honest & candid reviews on hundreds of IT Products from real users. Discover which products truly live up to the hype. Start reading now. http://productguide.itmanagersjournal.com/ _____________________________________________________________________ Ltsp-discuss mailing list. To un-subscribe, or change prefs, goto: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ltsp-discuss For additional LTSP help, try #ltsp channel on irc.freenode.net
