Basic RAID 1 backup/file server

M

MRAB54

Gawd
Joined
Sep 9, 2001
Messages
853
I'm running a samba file server (FreeBSD) on a crappy Dell GX260 that my work was throwing out. Today, it looks like the box powered itself down and I can't figure out why. It booted up fine though... I'm looking to build a simple, reliable backup server with a mirrored array. Performance doesn't really matter, it just needs to be a reliable RAID. The cheaper the better.

Anyone have any ideas? One question I have is if ECC RAM matters? Any cheap RAID card recommendations?

Every time I think about building a server I go down the slippery slope of adding features, possible VMware ESX server, the ability to be a media server etc. In the end, I just waste a lot of time researching and finally decide that it isn't worth the money.
 
danman said:
RAID isn't a backup.
Click to expand...

Agreed. RAID protects you from a hard drive death not accidental or deliberate deletion, virus, filesystem corruption ...

One question I have is if ECC RAM matters?
Click to expand...
Well if you have an Intel xeon processor or an AMD processor then maybe. Since you said cheap I would not bother. At work I used ECC in my Opteron servers but that was when you needed server processors to have more than 1 core.. Now I just use desktop stuff. However my opteron servers I purchased in 2004/5 are still running while some of the desktops died..
 
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Ok, assuming my gf doesn't accidentally delete the entire array... Sure, bad choice of words by me. I want a redundant array to protect against a drive failure. I have online backup that I will use sparingly mainly because of the horridly slow upload speed.

At work, I've seen some terribly buggy old RAID cards. I would trust a standalone card more than an onboard/software RAID that might decide to corrupt the entire array at any given moment.
 
You said you were using freebsd. On any non windows operating system (linux, freebsd, opensolaris ...) the builtin raid is better than any fakeraid and I believe better than most hardware raid. So that is why I said you do not need a raid card. In either case you are talking about raid1 which benifits little from a hardware raid card since it does not make use of the xor raid processor anyways.
 
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