On Sunday 01 August 2004 11:48 pm, Pieter Hulshoff wrote:
Hello all,
I want to set up a home file server, using RAID-5 with 4 or more disks per array (possibly 2 arrays in time). Any suggestions you could give me as far as a choice for a motherboard or a RAID controller? Oh, Gb ethernet might be a nice extra as well.
Regards,
Pieter Hulshoff
If you buy a raid controller then it pretty much does not matter which mobo you get. But be sure you go to the supported hardware section of the SuSE Manual/Website and make sure the raid controller is supported. OR you could do software raid. This lets you use any mix of disks (scsi, ata, sata) and combine them into an array. Yast handles this quite nicely. With today's fast processors, the overhead of a software raid is no longer significant. Fuurther, you can upgrade processors along the way and get a speed boost but the raid controllers won't be any faster than they day you purchase them. As for the MOBO, just be sure you have enough pci slots, as its easy to get stuck with those boards that have only two or three slots these days. That makes it hard to add more controllers. And for IDE drives you really only want 1 disk per controller in the raid, which means you will have to buy a dual IDE controller to get up to 4 disks in the array. (2 on board and two on card). Sometimes event two ide controller cards are nice - that way you use the built in mobo controllers for other devices - see next para. I would recommend keeping all the system stuff on a regular flat disk, not in the raid array. (Whether or not its hardware raid or software raid). Its less complicated to set up and a lot easier when its upgrade time. Just unplug your raid controllers, upgrade the system and re-plug with assurance that your data will be untouched. If the budget will bear it, scsi is nice for this as well, but its a lot more expensive for disks and controllers to go scsi. -- _____________________________________ John Andersen