User-Agent: Microsoft-Entourage/10.1.0.2006
Date: Wed, 17 Jul 2002 13:20:12 -0500
Subject: Software RAID, a bit OT
From: Ben Gollmer <ben@jatosoft.com>
To: XFS <linux-xfs@oss.sgi.com>
Message-ID: <B95B1F8C.1E61%ben@jatosoft.com>
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Hi storage gurus!

Hope you don't mind me asking this on-list, but I've gotten some very
helpful storage-related info from here in the past. I'm putting together a
server for a small group of developers; we have no real budget, so we're
trying to keep things cheap. Here's our hardware specs so far:

2x P3 700 MHz
512 MB RAM
2 Promise PCI ATA-133 controllers
3 Seagate 80 GB HDDs

This server is going to handle file sharing, e-mail, CVS, and a bug-tracking
database for us. Our project has some rather large files so we need a good
amount of storage space. I was planning to software RAID 5 the HDDs together
for a total of 160 GBs. I have been enjoying XFS on my workstation but I
know it has had problems with software RAID 5 in the past. Are these
problems fixed now?

We also considered trying to grab another 80 GB drive from somewhere and do
a RAID 0+1 (still giving us 160 GBs storage) but I don't know if Linux
software RAID handles this well.

Most of us run the -aa kernel tree on our workstations but I have no problem
running SGI CVS kernels on the server if they are reasonably stable. Any
input would be much appreciated :)

Ben