RE: Minutes of the GNOME Foundation Board meeting 28 November 200 0

[Gregory Leblanc <GLeblanc cu-portland edu>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Owen Taylor [mailto:otaylor redhat com]
> 
> Alan Cox <alan lxorguk ukuu org uk> writes:
> 
> > >   nay, it's based on software RAID :-\, you know that 
> journalling and
> > > softraid are not friend at all ... yet.
> > 
> > OK 2 or 4 port IDE raid card as well, maybe a disk to go 
> raid1 not raid5 is
> > needed for that
> 
> Since this seems to be a subject of interest, lets see if I 
> can summarize.
[snip]
> 
>  - I probably would still be nervous about ext3 on general principle,
>    but if Alan says it is OK, I trust him.

You trust Alan?  :)  You're braver than I am, after all of Telsa's stories
about broken hardware.

[snip]
>  - The existing drives (and spares) we have are SCSI (9g RAID
>    barracudas), so a SCSI solution would generally be preferred.
> 
>    Since the machine is going to be CVS only, we don't need an upgrade
>    in total capacity - a 4-drive array should be plenty big
>    enough with raid-5 or even raid-1. (The CVSROOT is 
> currently ~2gig.)

4 drives makes for a very nice RAID 10 (or 01, depending on how you think
about it) array.  Although I imagine that disk speed isn't that much of an
issue here.

>  - If somebody has a recommendation for a SCSI raid controller that
>    is reliable and trouble-free to configure with Linux, and not
>    horribly expensive, finding the means to purchase it shouldn't 
>    be a problem.

Ah-ha!  Finally an area that I've qualified for.  There are a few options
here, but getting RAID 5 that's as fast as software RAID 5 is expensive.
The Mylex AccelRAID cards have reasonable performance and decent prices.
Mylex ExtremeRAID cards are very fast, but expensive.  The DPT SmartRAID V
cards worked well for me, but I'm somewhat wary now that they've been
purchased by Adaptec.  There are drivers available from them, but you have
to know who to ask, as they're not publicly available.  Those would be my
top choices for RAID cards, probably in that order.  Let me know if you want
more info,
	Greg