[Sussex] Lots of IDE drives...

[Martin Easton]

Hi Alan,

I have just bought an old Compaq industrial server to learn with.
It uses 4-SCSI drives in its array and the controller can deal
simultaneously with 28 Drives!! It can run in mirrored and striped
configurations. I believe it is RAID 0 and RAID 1, there is also RAID 0+1.
I think this takes two drives and uses half of their capacity striped
between the two drives, and then mirrors that configuration on the remaing
spare capacity. Bit confusing really. Seems to work well. I can hot-unplug
either drive, and it keeps going. RAID 5 it the thing to aim for, whatever
that does.

As far as I have seen with a desktop PC, the best manufacturer for RAID
cards is "PROMISE". Have a look and see what you can find. I am new to Linux
so have no idea what it can understand. I suspect almost anything!

Good Luck.

Martin

-----Original Message-----
From: sussex-bounces at mailman.lug.org.uk
[mailto:sussex-bounces at mailman.lug.org.uk] On Behalf Of Paul Tansom
Sent: 19 September 2005 1:49 PM
To: LUG email list for the Sussex Counties
Subject: Re: [Sussex] Lots of IDE drives...

Alan Pope wrote:
> On 19/09/05, Ronan Chilvers <ronan at thelittledot.com> wrote:
> 
>>Anyone done this and can recommend a good card?  Is an extra controller
>>card a good way to go?  Any more suggestions?  Cheap is good with this
>>one since I'm just playing around but I don't want to have to jump
>>through any hoops with the hardware.
> 
> Don't neglect the PSU. Often the barrier isn't the number of channels,
> but the amount of current draw when you start the computer up as all
> the disks spin up at once. You may find that you get errors where the
> disks appear not to be recognised, when i fact this just that a
> symptom of having too-low a wattage PSU.

Boy that takes me back to when I could actually justify using a nice set
of SCSI drives for my own machines (and used them at work) - setting the
SCSI BOIS for which ones spun up on power on, and then waiting and
listening to them being spun up in turn. Sounded like you were getting
ready for take of :) I really wish SCSI drives weren't so expensive,
they really are much nicer than IDE :(

-- 
Paul Tansom | Aptanet Ltd. | http://www.aptanet.com/

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