John Bown wrote:
Hello everyone. I have an old server with an IDE RAID card in it on which I'd like to install openSUSE 10.3. The problem is, support for said RAID card (a Dell CERC ATA/100) has been discontinued for some time now. With that I ask, how feasible and/or advisable would it be to attempt the following?
1) Install openSUSE and configure it to use software RAID (two mirrored IDE drives (master/slave) for system, two stripped IDE drives (master/slave) for data) 2) Enable Encrypted File System (EFS)
Basically, I'm worried that an IDE based machine will be painfully slow due to the high disk activity. Ideally I would use the machine's existing SCSI U320 interface, but the required hard drives are just too expensive.
Get some modern SATA disks. They're doing I/O at 300 Gbyte/s now. While they don't have out-of-order queueing like SCSI and SAS, they do offer high burst speeds for I/O (Serial Attached SCSI...same cables but use SAS cards -- which conveniently can ALSO control SATA disks, too. Each port individually determines if that cable is attached to a SATA or an SAS disk.
Since the machine has two 2.4GHz Xeon processors in it, couldn't I designate one to do nothing but RAID and encryption,
That would be the master/slave CPU model of running a *nix kernel. While it was cutting edge in 1982, it was obsolete by 1985.
thereby leaving the other processor free to do everything else, such as running virtual machines? If so, can anyone point me in the direction of a good online how-to?
Considering that your 2.4 GHz processor runs several orders of magnitude faster than your disk drives can send or recieve data, AND that most controllers have bus-master capability, there's really no point in this. Disk I/O has very little impact on modern CPUs, unless you're running Serial Attached SCSI, and say, doing several hundred thousand database transactions/second on a database which is spread across a few thousand disk drives. And even then, the overwhelming majority of the disk I/O load will be on the bus-master controller cards, not the CPU cores.
Thank you for your collective time.
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