You should only use 1 drive per IDE channel, set up as master. The way IDE is designed, a broken slave might well bring the whole channel down. You also don't want to use different interface standards / speeds on the same channel, as the channel (bus) will autonegotiate to the highest (hopefully) common standard / speed. DVD:s and CD-ROM:s are typically slower than hard drives. So, only one drive per channel, CD / DVD on a separate channel and if you want maximum security, even spread your drives across two or more IDE / SATA controllers. Cheers /Niclas

From: Pieter Hulshoff To: John Andersen CC: suse-linux-e@suse.com Subject: Re: [SLE] Which motherboard/RAID controller for home file-server? Date: Tue, 3 Aug 2004 11:18:22 +0200

On Tue, Aug 03, 2004 at 01:08:38AM -0800, John Andersen wrote:

...

On Monday 02 August 2004 03:48 am, Louis Richards wrote:

...

I would buy two additional IDE cards so each drive is by itself on a channel. I always mirror boot and swap. The rest can be RAID 5.

Actually that's not totally necessary, as long as two drives in the SAME Array do not share a controller.

So if he was planning two arrays anyway, he could use all of the Masters in one array, and all the slaves in the other array.

(make sure the newer/larger/faster disks are masters and older/smaller/slower disks are slaves.

The current idea is as follows (using a HPT 454 PCI card, 4 channels, 8 devices):

M S IDE1 OS DVD IDE2 MD0 HPT1 MD0 HPT2 MD0 HPT3 MD0 HPT4 MD0

leaving 5 slave ports for a later extention (where I will most likely switch the old array to the slaves, and place the newer (bigger) drives to the masters). Comments?

Regards,

Pieter Hulshoff

-- Check the headers for your unsubscription address For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com Please read the FAQs: suse-linux-e-faq@suse.com

_________________________________________________________________ Help STOP SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail