On 21/02/2010 20:56, Matthew Hannigan wrote:
On Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 03:18:24PM +1100, Nigel Allen wrote: >
Greetings
I want to set up a pair of 1 TB drives on an HP DL145 G3 and I'm
looking for suggestions as to the best way to partition them.
Would I be best using software RAID and LVM? Given that it's a
fairly busy machine (mail server for 40+ users) I'd like to achieve:
1) Speed
2) Reliability
3) Ease of maintenance.
Anyone care to take a punt at a layout?
G3 has hardware RAID doesn't it? That has one big advantage over software
RAID. Ease of maintenance if one fails - you just pull it out, stick in
a same drive and it does recovery. Linux need not know anything has
happened.
So for 2 and 3 I'd go hardware RAID.
For 1. (speed) software RAID might have a slight advantage. You also get
greatly improve flexibility - you don't have to mirror everything,
right now.
Alas - hardware raid is only available on the hot-plug machines and
given that the disks are internal on this one I'm going to guess not.
Even the two DL360's the customer has have a great big sticker on them
that says "When SATA drives are fitted, hot-plug and LED features are
not currently supported :(
I am planning to fit (was temporarily) an Adaptec PCI-Express card
(AAR-1220SA) to the spare slot in the box box to transfer the data from
the two existing (very small and very full) SATA drives to the new ones.
This supports RAID thus:
The Adaptec RAID 1220SA card is a two-port, PCI Express x1 controller
featuring Adaptec HostRAID^(TM) - an integrated RAID technology that
maximizes system performance and uptime. The Adaptec 1220SA supports
up to two 3Gb/s Serial ATA drives, Native Command Queuing, and offers
RAID levels 0, 1, and JBOD (individual drive). The Adaptec 48-bit
logical block addressing (LBA) support enables use of disk drives
exceeding 137 GB in capacity. The Adaptec 1220SA supports Windows®
2000, Windows Server 2003, Windows XP, RedHat Linux, SuSE Linux, and
NetWare.
This being the case, I might be tempted to leave this card in
permanently for the hardware RAID features and bypass the in-built SATA
controller.
I suppose it will all come out on the night - in the worst case scenario
I'll just chuck the old full drives back in and wait until a weekend.
Rgds
Nigel.
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