By the way. Here's a progress report. First the bad news - As I said before, I haven't been able to get the PCI IDE controller card (which is based on a Silicon Image 0680 chipset with Medley software) to work, since it seems to get hung in the bios (either the MOBOs or the cards) presumably because it doesn't like the raid setup. I don't want to use it as a raid controller and I can't figure out how to make it act like a simple IDE controller, although both the description of the card on the intrex website and the "manual" (actually just a 4-page pamphlet) that came with the card say that raid is optional. But I notice that the first page of the manual has what appears to be two part numbers SIL680-RAID and SIL-680-IDE so I'm guessing that "option" here is in which version you purchase.
Now the good news - I attached one of the new 160 GB to the second unused IDE connector and once I got the boot order right in the BIOS, Linux came up and sees it as a 160GB disk. Now I have to think about how I want to partition the two big drives. I'm figuring that I'll move my /home and /var directories rom the little SCSI drive that it's on now to one of the big guys, and use the SCSI drives for swap and system space, which should give me some room to play with newer system software while stil leaving the old reliable RH9 installation until I'm comfortable with abandoning it. I also figure that I'll use the two big drives to back-up the small ones and interesting stuff on each other. Jeremy wrote a note a few months ago in which he analyzed the efficiency of rsbackup for backing up home directories in terms of how big the multiple backup generations were compared to how big they would be without the hard link magic. I'm curious as to how much bigger a multiple generation rsbackup of say the /home directory to the size of the /home directory itself? -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/ TriLUG PGP Keyring : http://trilug.org/~chrish/trilug.asc
