Linux file server

Mark Musone mmusone at shatterit.com
Fri Aug 22 01:26:26 EDT 2003


The most serious implication (which is quote often serious) is that fact
that IDE is not a multitasking protocol. So performance, expecially with
a raid-5 setup is usually poor. (every drive has to wait for for all the
drives to send a command and get an answer back) in a raid-5 setup where
your essentially striping bits across disks..this suffers dramatically..
One solution, if steadfast on still going with IDE raid is to buy IDE
raid cards that have built in buffering. This way it sends and queues up
the queries in memory..

If this is NOT being used for performance reasons, i.e. it's just an
office type file server light to medium use, it shouldn’t be a big
problem..

One other caveat from what I've seen personally is that the IDE drives
nowadays are horrible as far as reliability. Mi'm lucky if a brand new
IDE drive lasts a year nowadays. My old IDE drives from 5 years ago are
however still humming along

-Mark


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-nflug at nflug.org [mailto:owner-nflug at nflug.org] On Behalf Of
cliff at cliffmeyers.com
Sent: Friday, August 22, 2003 12:47 AM
To: nflug at nflug.org
Subject: Linux file server

Hi Everyone,


Does anyone have experience running a large (500 GB - 1 TB) RAID 5 array
using
IDE drives with Linux?  SCSI seems to be the standard used for these
kind of
systems but it easily doubles the price if not more.  Are there any
serious
implications of using IDE with a large RAID array?  Thanks a bunch.


-Cliff

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