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PhoenixMDM

Piano Man
Joined
Aug 21, 2001
Location
Candia, NH
My current fileserver is a p3 866, 384mb ram, and 2x120 gb drives. It's a waste of space to have it set up the way it's set up, so I decided I'm going to redo it with raid mirroring.
I've been happy with Yoper on it, but I've become such a gentoo fan that I feel I must put gentoo on it.
I've never really played with raid before, can anyone reccommend a good guide?

And also, I'd like this quick. I'm leaving for college friday and I promised my dad I'd have this thing all set and mirroring before I leave. I know it's not much time to troubleshoot or anything, but this doesn't need to be complicated. I can set up ftpd and sshd and all that good stuff easily. I just don't want to have to spend a week learning about raid if i can get it up in an hour.
 
It's set up as two 120 drives, one mounted as /, the other as a drive under /mnt/

I'm using only around 80 gigs or so of it, but scattered between the two. I figure a much better use of the space is to use the second drive as a mirror.
 
Mirroring drives (raid 1, what's on drive 0 is what's on drive 1) can be done at the hardware level, if your mobo supports it. You run the mobo utils/or bios settings to set this up, and then the os just sees the one drive and you install the os as normal.
 
Through a bizarre course of luck I found at the dump today a fully functional dell dimension 4100, exactly what my server is, same specs, but with no hard drive and a 900mhz cpu. I'm going to merge the two systems, use software raid with that guide on the gentoo wiki (i was looking at that one.. just didn't know if there was anything else, i've had gentoo wikis lead me astray), and have an awesomely good server.

Of course, one quick last question can't hurt.. I've got an ATA-100 pci card just laying around. Would it be better to use it and have hardware raid, or would it be better to use the onboard ide controller and have software raid and ata133 speed? The system will now have 512mb ram because of what i scrounged today, if that matters any.
 
Good find!
If the pci controller supports raid, that would be better, performance wise, but you may have issues with finding a linux driver,,if not, then software raid. Are you planning on raid 0 or raid 1?
 
raid 1. I'm actually surprised that an adaptec ata100 pci hardware raid controller would give better performance than ata133 onboard ide controller. Anything fancy I should know about doing it hardware-style then? This is 100% new ground for me!
 
You could pick up an ATA133 raid controller for $5 on ebay too.
 
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