[Sussex] AMD Sempron Chips and BIG backups

Alan Pope alan.pope at gmail.com
Mon Dec 12 12:57:03 UTC 2005


On 12/12/05, Ronan Chilvers <ronan at thelittledot.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 12 Dec 2005 11:01:00 +0000
> Alan Pope <alan.pope at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Yeah, I've just bought 8 off 200GB SATA disks for home backups myself.
> > Will raid them as mirrored rather than RAID 5 though.
>
> Where did you get them?

Ebuyer.

http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/index.html?action=c2hvd19wcm9kdWN0X292ZXJ2aWV3&product_uid=81601

> What make?

Seagate Barracuda. The link above is the 300GB ones.

> How come not raid5?

Why not mirroring? :)

I plan to have 3 2-port controllers with 6 disks in one machine. Disk
0 and 1 in controller 0. Disk 0' and 2 on controller 1, and disk 1'
and 2 on controller 3. That way if any single disk or single drive
fails I'm okay. I could actually survive with two disk failures
depending which ones of course.

> Are the 8 drives going into several
> machines?

6 in one machine. The other two in another.

> Are you using any extension cards for extra drive channels
> or have you got enough on board channels?
>

3 of these in one machine.

http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/index.html?rb=13982962267&action=c2hvd19wcm9kdWN0X292ZXJ2aWV3&product_uid=48670

> Have you experimented with hotplugging SATA drives?

Nope, not tried it.

> Thanks for that.  I'll have a read.  What filesystems are you using?

ext3 at home mostly, but considering xfs or reiser on the big box when
i build it. I'll probably use LVM too so that means I can do dynamic
resizing of partitions easily (which I believe ext3 can't *easily*
do).

> I've been reading about XFS and like the fact that it handles large
> files well, but ext3 has a better reputation for data integrity as far
> as I can see.

I don't think it matters really. They're all pretty much the same from
a data integrity point of view. Performance is probably the key factor
for you I guess?

> If its AIX are you using JFS?

No, it's mostly non-JFS. Oracle databases storing their data on RAW
devices, not using the filesystem.

> Should I consider the JFS linux stuff?
>

Reiser and ext3 are both good filesystems.

> What I'm after is a server build which will give us room to grow the
> disk usage, both in terms of having sufficient disk space initially and
> being able to add new disk space in future.  LVM is particularly
> interesting here so I'll read up on the snapshot stuff...
>

Whether you do snapshots or not, LVM is a Good Thing for managing disk space.

Cheers,
Al.




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