--On 27 July 2005 15:13 +0200, Ulrich Kahl wrote:
I plan to set up a fileserver using RAIDframe - I can't afford a hardware RAID-controller like Megaraid i4 (around EURO 280,--) and used ones are impossible to get, so I will use the software version.
As long as you're prepared to look internationally, Megaraid i4 (occasionally in the guise of Dell CERC PATA) do come up on Ebay sometimes (one sold on ebay.co.uk for GBP75 a few days ago). They're usually in the GBP60-100 range. If you don't need it in a hurry, it might be worth waiting and watching a while longer, it's a lot easier to install/upgrade the OS onto a hardware raid controller than raidframe/ccd.
The raid will use 3 or 4 identical harddrives. My questions: - what is better, every drive use it's own IDE-channel (no master/slave) or not?
Every drive on it's own channel would have better performance and might increase the chance of keeping the system running if a drive fails (though, if you really want that, IDE RAID is probably not the answer :)
The board, which I will use is a ASUS P5A Super 7 with ALi Aladdin V chipset.
Oh, I have one of those. Unless it's a late revision, using the on-board cache only the first 128mb RAM is cacheable (K6-III helps on this motherboard due to the on-chip cache). And don't forget, if your filesystems are large, that you'll need plenty of RAM to fsck.
