Re: Minutes of the GNOME Foundation Board meeting 28 November 2000

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Alan Cox <alan lxorguk ukuu org uk> writes:

> >  - I probably would still be nervous about ext3 on general principle,
> > but if Alan says it is OK, I trust him.
> 
> I have 180Gig of disk on ide raid with ext3. 
> 
> >  - 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.
> 
> I can recommend several reliable ones but except for the older AMI Megaraid
> cards they are priced for 'enterprise customers'. Its not beyond the realm
> of possibility that a pair of 45Gig IBM ide disks (or 4x20 gig even more
> so) with an ide raid card will be both cheaper and faster than buying something
> like an ICP vortex or a DAC960.

I'm a pretty big fan of IBM drives and their recent IDE offerings
are nice. (In fact, the current gnome.org backup setup involves staging
to a 45gig IBM IDE drive.)

That being said, my concerns with going to a totally new drive setup
are:

 - Reliability - cvs.gnome.org gets hit _hard_; when we ran 
   a 2-drive RAID-1 setup before switching to the current server,
   we lost one of the drives twice within a year. So, I'm reasonably
   impressed that we haven't lost any of the current 4 drives in 
   the subsequent year. (May be just luck.)

 - A big pile of nice drives to dispose of. (Hmmm, I suppose I could
   build GTK+ pretty quickly with that setup... ;-)

I don't have a good feeling yet on which way we should be going here,
It looks like either IDE or SCSI hw raid would cost about the same
upfront, and would have some tradeoffs either way. On the other hand
staying with software raid and no journalling for now, may be fine
with some tweaks. I expect the box to be considerably more stable
when it is CVS-only in any case.

Regards,
                                        Owen