[K12OSN] server hardware advice needed

[Eric Feldhusen]

Dale Sykora wrote:
>>
>> Of course you could add whatever drives you wanted, say 80GB for $75,
>> and skip the hot swap trays.  But either way you have the benefit of
>> SCSI style RAID with an IDE price.  This could be just enough to help
>> the lower budgets afford performance.
>>
>> Just my 2 cents worth.
> 
> To add to Jim's suggestion, I have heard good things about 3ware raid 
> cards.  I'm not sure if this was the card seen at buy.com

I can agree with that. I have 2 seperate file/print/nfs/web/samba 
servers for different districts running on 3ware 7508 parallel ata raid 
cards.  The only problem I have is that I formatted the partitions as 
ext3 and there's some weird bug with 3ware cards and ext3.  Lot's of 
continuous small read and writes slow down file transfer to about 4MB 
per second. If you use another journaled filesystem, XFS, ReiserFS, JFS, 
etc.. I've been told the slowdown is gone.  I haven't had a chance to 
convert since it's not easy coming up with 400GB of storage to transfer 
partitions to and from and my worse use school district is about 180 
Windows 9x/2k/XP machines using roaming profiles and during the class 
period change, the problem is the worst, but it's not noticeable to the 
users.

Eric Feldhusen
Network Administrator for Adams,
Chassell, Dollar Bay-Tamarack City, and
Lake Linden-Hubbell Public Schools