Dave Alden wrote:
> Hi,
> I've been holding off installing a 450G raid-5 NFS server until I felt
> all of the parts would fit together happily. :-) I'm hoping that the
> time is right, so, if I install the XFS modified Redhat 7.2 and update
> the kernel to the latest CVS snapshot, will I get the (almost) latest
> version of LVM. In addition, will I be able to take snapshots?
> ...thnx, ...dave alden
I might be old fashioned, but I like hardware RAID. I currently have an
Escalade 7800 with (6) 7,200rpm 40GB Maxtor drives. (2) are in RAID-1
for the "System" Volume (40GB usable) and (4) are in RAID-5 for the
"User" Volume (120GB usable). The "System" volume is used because
RAID-5 is not ideal for swap, /tmp, /var, and the 3Ware card is
excellent at RAID-1 (because it does load balancing).
The Escalade 7800 is just over $300 -- otherwise, it's straight disk
cost. If you used (6) 7,200rpm 80GB drives (I'm looking at some Seagate
Baracudas myself), you'd have 400GB usable for "User" -- reserving 2
channels for the "System" volume, whatever disk/size you see fit (I
recommend you don't put your swap, /tmp, /var, etc... on the RAID-5
volume for performance reasons).
The newer 3Ware Escalade 7850 sports 2MB SRAM instead of only the 1MB
SRAM (note, that is "static" RAM, like CPU cache, *NOT* SDRAM, like main
memory). Unlike most traditional RAID controllers that use a
microcontroller and DRAM, the Escalde is more like a CPU-speed "switch"
with ASIC and SRAM. As such, 2MB is quite a bit bigger for caching than
1MB (which doesn't matter until you start caching RAID-5 writes ;-).
The 7850 is about $500, so I'm waiting to see the forthcoming
StorageReview review of it to see if it is any better.
-- TheBS
--
Bryan "TheBS" Smith mailto:b.j.smith@xxxxxxxx chat:thebs413
Engineer AbsoluteValue Systems, Inc. http://www.linux-wlan.org
President SmithConcepts, Inc. http://www.SmithConcepts.com
----------------------------------------------------------------
"The [US] Constitution guarantees you Free, not Fair. 'Fair' is
a socialist concept." -- Shawn McMahon
|