Topic: Hardware for new server, Suggestions ?

[Damien Ryan]

Hi All,

After years of setting up e-smith on old machines, I have a client who wants
a brand new raid gateway/server for their office.

My plan is to use the following config:
motherboard   Gigabyte GA-8PE667 Ultra main board with
                      Promise IDE RAID 0, 1 function plus UDMA ATA 133 support
                      Integrated Intel® PRO/100 VE Network Connection
harddrive         2 X Western Digital 80G 7200RPM ATA-100
network card   CNET 10/100 Network Card
CPU               Intel Pentium 4 2.40G (533Mhz FSB)  

Any suggestions anyone has most welcome


Damien

[Tyler Conrad]

Ok, that is some nice hardware you have posted. Only a few minor suggestions.

1. Get an a7n8x deluxe motherboard for the dual 1000 lan ports and onboard serial raid (just use adaptors to run ide).

2. Try the Special Edition Western Digitals. they have an 8mb cache which allows for faster data transfer.

3. Nice Processor choice, if u want to use the asus mobo u'll need amd tho. I suggest 2500 Barton core.

4. How much memory are you planning on running inside?

[Herculito]

Hi Damien,

I would avoid the promise controller (installation issues, no build in support e-smith not even 5.6, performance issues) and look for a real raid solution for example 3Ware (build software RAID works fine too).

Grtz,

Herc

[Guck Puppy]

Just FYI, the A7N8X mobo does indeed have two LAN ports - one is 100 (the 3com) and the other is 1000 (the 'Nvidia').

Amen to the Raid card idea - I hear nothing but badness about the onboard mobo 'raid controllers' and Linux.

G

[Graeme Fleming]

Gotta client running 5.6 on an AMD1800, 256MB SDRAM system using RAID 0 with 2 * 40GB WD drives (JB 8MB cache models).  System purrs along nicely as fileserver.

On other useful point is that the WD JB drives still have 3 year warranty wheras every other IDE drive I know of is now 1 year warranty.

HTH

[Tom Keiser]

You guys need to seriously reconsider using Raid zero. If *either* drive glitches or fails, you lose all your data.  Raid 1 (mirroring) or better yet Raid 10 (striping + mirroring) is a much better choice for speed and reliability. If you just want capacity, use Raid 5 -- and 3ware makes a decent card for this for IDE drives, but a SCSI Raid 5 is still the best.

And, if you use the WD drives, be certain to get the "JB" drives, the others are pretty junky.

[Tom Carroll]

I have just recently purchased three 100gb WD hard drives.  I plan to upgrade to SME 5.6 in June.  I am very interested in setting these drives up in a raid.

Do I need a raid controller, or can I use software raid?

What are the difference between the IDE raid and software raid?

If an IDE raid card would be better to use, which card has been found to work best with SME 5.6?

Thanks!

Tom

[Damien Ryan]

Hi All,

Thanks for all your suggestions.
Tom and Tyler, I'll make sure I use the Western Digital 80G 7200RPM ATA-100 (8Mb buffer) harddrives instead, and make sure they are 'JB'.

Herc and Guck, thanks for mentioning the onboard raid issues,
I'll scale the hardware back the the Gigabyte GA-8GE667 that lacks the onboard
raid, so as to avoid confusion as to what raid is operating.

I didn't realise e-smith could do software/emulation? raid.
I'm tempted to go down that path as the machine does not need to be
high performance, and I love simplicity.
My hardware supplier only seems to supply Adaptec raid cards.
If I use a raid card it will probably be an Adaptec IDE Raid 1200A.

Tyler, I'd be looking at 512 meg DDR 333 (2700?) RAM.

Tom Carrol, I don't know enough to answer your questions, but the above posts imply you can do the raid all in software (out of the box in e-smith/smeserver ??
not sure??). I'd be guessing hardware solutions would be quicker though.

thanks all

[Shane]

Hi all,
Most of us should only be interested in RAID for the added redundancy offered with mirroring our drives. I am sure the end users won't notice the extra 1/10000000000000 of a second it takes to open their email. LOL
If you require blistering disk performance, then you could consider a Compaq Proliant, or similar, with a hot swap raid 5 array (SCSI of course).  I happen to have an older one of these with a pentium pro 200 processor and 256 of ram.
There are plenty of companys out there that offer proven hardware packages, take your pick...
With todays modern processors and gigabytes of ram, software raid should be fine as long as there is a "nice" way to manage/maintain the array.


Just my 2 cents

Shane

[Tom Keiser]

First, here's an inexpensive, reliable place to buy 3ware:

http://www.hypermicro.com/store/index.htm

The Adaptec 1200A is not supported by Adaptec for Linux.

Second, while there are some here who like software raid, I've been put off that by the screams for help and confusion in getting the array back to normal after a drive failure.  It's pretty much a no-brainer with hardware raid, but that's just my opinion.

T.

[Kevin Flanagan]

Software RAID is a terrible solution!  IDE RAID is tolerable for relatively low end solutions, if you want RAID for availability or performance you should get a "real" server, one that comes with SCSI RAID included, and go with that, it's a good bit more dough, but FAR more reliable, and with the right controller, faster than IDE RAID of a similar configuration in most cases.

[Tom Carroll]

Thanks Kevin.  That is what I was looking for.  I did find out that I will need an IDE RAID card since I have three 100gb Western Digital drives.  I do not know if they are the "JB" drives mentioned earlier, but they are the 7200rpm with the 8mb cache on them - I think.  I will have to check them out.

It looks like the 3ware 5xxx/6xxx series ATA RAID card is supported according to RedHat, but I did see somewhere here that someone plugged in the 7xxx card it it
worked under 5.6.  So, I guess I will go out and grab one of those to use.  That card will cost me more than my three drives put together!

Anyway, thanks for the heads up.

Tom

[Charlie Brady]

Kevin Flanagan wrote:

> it's a good bit more dough, but FAR more reliable,

Really? Do you have evidence to support that? Do you know of reliability problems with linux's software RAID implementation?

Charlie

[Ed Form]

Charlie Brady wrote:
>
> Kevin Flanagan wrote:
>
> > it's a good bit more dough, but FAR more reliable,
>
> Really? Do you have evidence to support that? Do you know of
> reliability problems with linux's software RAID implementation?

It's certainly quicker, and with the major slowdown that you guys have imposed on us with 5.6 update 3 that starts to look very attractive.

Ed Form

[Charlie Brady]

Ed Form wrote:

> It's certainly quicker, and with the major slowdown that you
> guys have imposed on us with 5.6 update 3 that starts to look
> very attractive.

Excuse me, Ed, nobody has *imposed* anything on you. If you choose to use software which we make available, fine, but nobody is making you use it.

As to the slowdown you have experienced, I don't understand why a security fix to samba would make any difference at all. Nevertheless, any information you can provide about problems with the system can only help us, you and other users. And if you do know of reliability problems with linux software RAID, please let us know details.

Regards

Charlie