The thing that impacts performance most on those old machines is not the controllers as much as is it PCI. A friend of mine recently did something similar and ran into the fact that on his PCI sata card he was only able to get ~50MB/sec instead of the ~120MB/sec that each 2T drive can do. This is because PCI has a theoretical limit of about 133MB/sec. In practice PCI is just too slow for SATA.
You might want to consider replacing that old P4 board with one of these: http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/ATOM/ You get 6x SATAII and a nice low power dual core for around $200. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conventional_PCI 1) See above 2) I partition my server and run it off my 2T drives. I build 3 arrays. md0: 2G raid1 (root+boot) md1: 200G raid10 (LVM - usr / var / home) md2: Max raid6 (/data) My important documents tend to stay in /home and get backed up via crashplan to other machines and a copy in /data I keep all of my big media files and other junk on /data I leave this machine on 24/7 because I use it from remote for a bunch of tasks other than just being my SBS. 3) See above #2. I use a hybrid of a few things. 4) I use ext4 for everything these days. It's fast, stable, and well supported. I've been thinking about playing with things like ZFS/BTRFS, but nothing for production use yet. -- SuperQ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ SuperQ's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2139 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=84125 _______________________________________________ unix mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/unix
