file server for home

[Monty J. Harder]

"Jeremy Fowler" <jfowler at westrope.com> wrote:

> 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

  And people familiar with my standard scheme for WinBoxen will recognize
this as an excellent insurance policy - Keeping multiple copies of your boot
partition makes for simple recovery if^H^Hwhen things go south on you.  In
Linux, I routinely keep a 2nd copy of my kernel as /boot/vmlinuz.bak, and at
work I cp /stand/unix /stand/unix.good before I start linking SCO kernels
(because the default of unix and unix.bak doesn't go deep enough - I've been
bitten by this one at least once).

> 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.

  Except that you don't write everything everytime.  You take 'snapshots' of
a known-good machine environment, and deliberately =don't= keep the two
copies synchronized.

> 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

  We use SCSI on our customers' servers, not for speed but reliability.  And
then we put the HD and tape drive on separate controllers  to isolate the
systems from each other.  Sometimes we use SCSI RAID controllers, but that's
because we have customers in the NE Panhandle or the Black Hills that would
be down for days before we could get a tech on site to fix a bad HD.  I need
to persuade the PTB that we should =not= use SCSI CD drives - instead we
should go with ATAPI, not just because there's no justification for the
added expense, but because it will allow the CD drive to be separated from
the HD, leaving separate controllers for everything.

  But that's on a mission-critical server.  Not a home fileserver.