[Scottish] Scottish Digest, Vol 257, Issue 1

[Roland Ward]

scottish-request at mailman.lug.org.uk wrote:
> 
> Message: 1
> Date: Thu, 06 Aug 2009 18:54:17 +0100
> From: Julian Gibson <julian at rjmg.net>
> Subject: [Scottish] Hardware question?
> To: SLUG-list <scottish at mailman.lug.org.uk>
> Message-ID: <4A7B18C9.5010405 at rjmg.net>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
> 
> All
> 
> I've "acquired" a Dell Precision 670 with a pair of 147GB SCSIs.  I'm
> wanting to remove one of them and add a pair of 1.5TB SATAs in a Raid 1
> config.  I'll be using SuSE 11.1 and will do a software raid.
> The question is therefore... Will this be able to boot off the remaining
> SCSI (ie /dev/sda1) and still address the raid as /dev/md0 on the 2
> SATAs or will the bios want to always boot off the SATAs if it sees them
> first.  Don't want to plunk for the drives if it isn't going to work.
> 
> Cheers and thanks in advance
> Julian
> 


Why do you want to use a degraded SCSI array at all on the machine. Are
you not better simply using the 1.5Tb drives and ditching the SCSI drive?

Most RAID controllers can operate under JBOD (just a bunch of disks)
mode where yes you can use just one disk but again that's not going to
help you when your SCSI drive dies.

Do the Dell have on board SATA controllers? How old is it? If it doesn't
support SATA on board can I suggest you pick up a £80 3ware 8006 PCI
hardware raid controller (they have really good support in the kernel)
and plug that into your machine with the SATA disks only.



-- 
Roland Ward, The Penguin Factory