On Thu, May 11, 2006 at 10:02:44AM -0600, Kenneth Burgener wrote: > My primary concern is disk capacity, my second is speed, and my > third is redundancy.
All it takes is one hard drive failure for you to realize that your
primary concern is really redundancy.
> My first question is, is there a decent RAID 5 card within the $20,
> $80, and $120 range?
A co-worker of mine had an expensive 3ware RAID 5 controller in his
MythTV box. Something, somewhere went goofy, and he basically lost his
entire filesystem. This is not the first time that I have heard of a
hardware RAID controller card blowing away an entire filesystem; it
happened to a small internal mail server at work not too long ago.
For my MythTV box, I'm running a software RAID 5 with a hot spare (6
drives in total). I picked up a 550 watt Antec power supply and an
Antec P180 case; you need lots of power and lots of fans (the cooler
you can keep the drives, the better). The drives are parallel ATA, and
so with 3 controller cards each containing 2 buses, I have one drive
per bus.
So far, so good. It's fast and it's reliable; I have had no filesystem
corruption at all, even on sudden power loss. I trust the Linux kernel
code much more than I rely on any proprietary code embedded in a
wonder-card to handle things correctly. Make the actual hardware
devices as simple as possible, so there is minimal opportunity for the
manufacturer to screw things up, and then trust Al Viro, Greg
Kroah-Hartman, Andrew Morton, Linus Torvalds, and the rest of the gang
to do the job right. Remember, you can always patch your kernel if
there is a bug -- a bug in the hardware (it happens more frequently
than you might imagine) can generally only be dealt with via a
workaround in the driver, if that is even possible.
With very recent patches to the Linux kernel, I can even expand the
size of the RAID with additional storage devices if I so please. About
a year from now, as perpendicular storage technology gets cheaper, I'm
planning on doing a live staged migration from my current drives to
the larger drives by swapping out one device at a time and rebuilding
the array at each swap. Software tools to aid in that process, running
under the OS, are very nice.
My only snaffu was that the Silicon Image 0680 IDE chipset driver
apparently can't handle 2 cards in the system. The SII0680 chipset is
the one you're most likely to find in any of the <$40 cards at your
local electronics store. So I have a High Point chipset, a Silicon
Image chipset, and an nVidia chipset (in mainboard); they all work
very well, completely independently of one another.
Mike
.___________________________________________________________________.
Michael A. Halcrow
Security Software Engineer, IBM Linux Technology Center
GnuPG Fingerprint: 419C 5B1E 948A FA73 A54C 20F5 DB40 8531 6DCA 8769
"In science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts."
- Carl Sagan
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