IDE controller card and Fedora Core 3

[Robin Bowes]

Langdon Stevenson wrote:
> Thanks for the feedback John
> 
> I had a look at Clark Connect, but they don't really have anything to 
> offer me.  I am attempting to build a cheap Samba file server with large 
> capacity and reasonable redundancy.  Throughput isn't an issue, and I 
> don't need any services other than Samba on it.
> 
> I can't justify forking out for a new piece of hardware, but have a 
> bunch of components that will do the job if I can get them to play nicely.
> 
>  From you reply I take it that IDE controllers that use a Promise HPT 
> (HighPoint?) chipset are supported by Linux.  Is that the case?

Langdon,

Contrary to what has already been said, I believe that you should be 
fine runing Samba on RAID5 with a PII 400. Sure, it's not going to set 
the world on fire but, once the array has built the CPU should be plenty 
fast enough to keep up with updates.

I would echo the recommendation to keep the disks on separate 
controllers; if you put two on the same channel then one disk failing 
will most likely lock up the channel resulting in you losing two disks 
and therefore your whole array.

I can't offer any advice regarding whether or not the chipset is 
supported, but if you've got the cards and disks why not connect it all 
up and attempt an install?

Personally, I run a 6x250GB Maxtor SATA drives on 2 x Promise SATA150 
TX4 controllers. I have partitioned each drive identically with a 1.5GB 
partition (/dev/sd[abcdef]1) and a 248.5 GB (/dev/sd[abcdef]2). It is 
not possible to boot of RAID5 so I created a RAID1 mirror from 
/dev/sd[ad]1 and installed the base system there. I then created an huge 
RAID5 array from /dev/sd[abcdef] and used lvm to create logical volumes 
for /usr (10GB), /var (5GB) and /home (915GB). I mounted these and 
migrated /usr and /var off the root partition.

Hope this is useful,

R.
-- 
http://robinbowes.com