[NMLUG] More RAID Questions

[jeabrams at salud.unm.edu (John Abrams)]

>From my experience a RAID 5 partition is the best way to go for data, both from a recovery, and a performance point of view. OS partitions should be separate ( I use a RAID 1 pair exclusively for OS & a RAID 5 array for data. Expensive but easy to recover both from a disk failure or other hardware death..expense is relative to downtime and your time as well as user frustration times productivity lost)
 Hardware RAID is by far faster rebuilding if and when you have a problem.
IDE drives are a bit less dependable than SCSI but lots less expensive. If your data is critical and you are in a high availability situation you may want to reconsider your choice of ATA drives........I've had more than twice the number of dead SATA drives as SCSI over the last three months they all have run 24/7 for over 10 months though......( I have approaching 10T running SCSI, and about 10 other systems running SATA stand alone)... 

JEA

>>> timothyemerick@yahoo.com 02/23/05 2:26 PM >>>
After considering all of the kind replies I received in response to my last
RAID post I have a couple more questions that didn't seem to be clearly
addressed in any of the links that were sent.  Looks like I'll be nixing the
simple RAID0 or RAID1 controller that is on my motherboard in favor of a
RAID5 scenario.

1. Someone noted that software raid was just as fast as hardware raid.  This
machine will be a mostly dedicated Samba Server on a P4 1.8ghz machine.  Does
this still hold true or should I get a dedicated Promise Controller that
supports RAID5?

2. I thought I read somewhere that you should only use Drive0 on each
controller when using with RAID or you will get horrible performance.  Does
that hold water?  My onboard Promise RAID controller can be configured for
RAID or normal ATA100 IDE controllers.  As normal IDE controllers that would 
give me 4 controllers with 2 drives each.  With the above limitation it
sounds like I would only be able to use the Drive0 on each controller for my
raid array.  Could I use Drive1 for occasionally used devices (IDE-DVD/CDrom,
Large Backup HD) without a performance hit?

3. What is the math for RAID5?  I really only need around 60 gigs of storage.


4. I'm looking at getting 3 40 gig ATA100 HD's for the raid array to add to
the existing small HD for the linux OS, a 200 GIG HD for a rolling couple
days backup, and the IDE-CDrom drive.  How would you suggest hooking all that
up considering question #2?

5. Any tuning tips for Samba with WinXP workstations?

Thanks in advance

Tim Emerick




		
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