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Building server and have a question

S

seltz

n00b
Joined
Dec 15, 2008
Messages
8
I finally got all my parts except my hd's (which hopefully will be here tuesday) so here is my build:
MB: GIGABYTE GA-EP45-UD3P
Case: Norco-4020
Memory: OCZ Platinum 4GB DDR2 1066
PSU: CORSAIR CMPSU-850TX 850W
Raid Card: Areca 1280ML
HD: 10-WD 1TB Green SATA
HD OS: 1- Seagate 500 SATA
NIC: PCI-x Intel 10/100/1000 GB

My intent is to run ubuntu 8.10, its sole use will be as a file server for all my media and storage for my home computers. Where i am confused is, I would like to start off with 2 large arrays, I plan on running raid 6. What is the largest i can run as an array? I know if i run 2 5 disk arrays that will leave me 2 arrays at 3TB each. Can linux see a 3TB array? also, i have never used a hardware raid card before, does the card handle the formatting or does the OS? what will i want to use, ext3? fat32, fat? sorry for the silly questions but this is all new stuff to me. I run 2 linux boxes at home so i can get around fairly well in linux although i wouldnt say im a linux expert.
 
Linux can only see 520MB at once. It used to be 40MB, so don't complain.

Nah, just screwing with you. Linux should be able to see 3TB no probs. As for the HW raid card -- with the drives set up in the card's bios correctly, the arrays will appear to the OS to just be great big hard drives, if I'm understanding them right.
 
The formatting is handled by the OS, as alan.p said, the raid controller will present the array(s) to the system as one big volume per array, unless you have it set up to carve them into smaller chunks (this may or may not be a feature depending on your card). Volume size depends on what filesystem you use. Ext3 has some limitations, depending on what blocksize you use (I think by default it's 8TB, but can be anywhere between 2 and 16TB IIRC). I'm no expert, but from my research setting up my own fileserver, xfs had the best performance for larger files that you're likely to see in a media server, and has a volume limit measured in exabytes (ie far larger than you'll need for any forseeable future). It is worth noting that from a performance standpoint, the drives, controller and array configuration has vastly more of an impact than filesystem choice, so don't sweat it too much.
 
2 x 5 disk raid 6 arrays is a waste of hdds, what is your reason for wanting 2 arrays instead of 1?

Also I would suggest xfs for the file system in linux, the volume size limit is huge and if you run xfs directly on the volume without any partitions (or even in conjuction with lvm) it makes future oce/volume resizing a snap.
 
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