file server for home

[Jeremy Fowler]

> I've got to start choosing my words more carefully. I was speaking of
> software RAID. Software RAID could be done on a single HD (not that I
> recommend it in any way).

Whoa there! I'm going to have to give you some shit about that statement. The
very concept of RAID requires you to have more that one disk. However, you could
mirror two partitions on a single drive just so that you had two copies of
something. That way if you were about to change something on a really important
production machine and wanted a golden parachute to bail you out if in case
something were to go wrong. Then you would just stop mirroring and perform the
operation just on one partition, if all goes well remirror. If it doesn't, boot
off the unmodified partition and your back where you started. However, this
wouldn't offer any performance advantages. Actually it would reduce performance
by half since it has to write everything twice.

> SCSI is not that much more expensive than ATAPI.

Hogwash! You can get an 80GB 7200rpm UltraDMA100 (or UltraDMA133 I think it is
now) for $160

The same size for an Ultra160 SCSI version will cost you $500 (Going off prices
from www.pricewatch.com)

Then lets not forget the controller. A basic Adaptec 19160 controller will cost
you an additional $150 if your motherboard doesn't already have a scsi
controller built in. (Not many do)

> I said SCSI because of speed [10-15K RPM], up to 2x as fast as
> ATAPI can get (money is no object argument is no longer valid). And I
> said recommend, not must have. We are talking about a file server, and I
> don't know what he is planning on using it for.

A file server for home.... Home being the key word there. Now even if he does
have cable or DSL, his bottleneck isn't going to be the hard drive speed. It's
going to be the internet connection he has. The "money is no object argument" is
still very much valid. I mean, if you can get your company to foot the bill, go
ahead and spring for the SCSI. However, unless your going to be doing some
really freaky shit, you won't notice the difference in a real world environment.
I would spend the money on an IDE RAID controller; however, getting them to work
with distros out of the box has been, from personal experience, quite
frustrating. Promise controllers are ok, if your using one of the distro
versions their drivers support (and forget about ever using newer kernels
because promise doesn't distribute the source with their drivers, and they don't
update them very often). There are open source drivers out there, but they
aren't usually compiled by default into distro kernels. Well, not Redhat for
sure anyway. It usually requires an install onto a single drive first, then
recompile support for the controller, and then move the data on over.