Linux Raid5 build Tonight

[br0k3nman]

Tonight I'm putting together my 5x200gb seagate RAID 5 under linux with a 40gb seagate boot/OS drive. All drives are IDE, I have the standard 4 ide ports onboard and 2 promise pci controllers. I was going to put my cdrom/dvd and the boot drive on the same channel and the 5th drive on the spare onboard port, all others get their own port as well on a controller. Will the promise controllers cause conflicts?

The system is a p4 2.4 @ 3.2, 1gb DC ram with an abit IS7 on a neopower 2 480watt psu.
Would something slower suffice as long as I kept the PSU the same? (Think athlon 700)

I have copies of mandrake, fedora core 4, gentoo, ubuntu, suse, and vector, which distro would people suggest? I want something that makes it easy to maintain samba shares and keep the raid running. Having a good and easy package manager wouldn't hurt either! (I don't know if thise goes in the OS forum!) I am going to use madam http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-RAID-HOWTO.html tool. Anyone have any tips?

Software raid 5 under linux and i'm a bit of a lunixn00b. Wish me luck!

 

[unhappy_mage]

Debian is likely your best bet for stability, ease of use, maintainability, but it will be difficult to set up the first time through. The install system only makes a basic image with the ability to get more packages from the net, so almost anything you want to do with the system will take some more additional downloading and installing. However, most of this is just "apt-get install whatever", so it's not too bad.

WRT software raid 5, yes, an athlon 700 should handle the load in much the same manner as the p4 3.2. And the PSU is indeed important; this is what's babying all those drives along. It may be better to go with emvs with the raid 5 plugin, but again this is difficult to set up. One advantage of doing it this way is that you can easily add more disks to the filesystems, without too many problems. Another advantage is that it will let you create chunks of the disk for different types of item (movies, games, music, what have you) and dynamically manage the size of these chunks. Thus, you can easily see what takes up the most space, and it's simple to allocate more space for that category.

But if you're looking for simple, FC+mdadm will do you fine. Ask for help in the Linux forum if you get stuck, and good luck on your Linux install.

 

[br0k3nman]

Debian is likely your best bet for stability, ease of use, maintainability, but it will be difficult to set up the first time through. The install system only makes a basic image with the ability to get more packages from the net, so almost anything you want to do with the system will take some more additional downloading and installing. However, most of this is just "apt-get install whatever", so it's not too bad.

WRT software raid 5, yes, an athlon 700 should handle the load in much the same manner as the p4 3.2. And the PSU is indeed important; this is what's babying all those drives along. It may be better to go with emvs with the raid 5 plugin, but again this is difficult to set up. One advantage of doing it this way is that you can easily add more disks to the filesystems, without too many problems. Another advantage is that it will let you create chunks of the disk for different types of item (movies, games, music, what have you) and dynamically manage the size of these chunks. Thus, you can easily see what takes up the most space, and it's simple to allocate more space for that category.

But if you're looking for simple, FC+mdadm will do you fine. Ask for help in the Linux forum if you get stuck, and good luck on your Linux install.

Thanks a ton. I'm using Ubuntu (Debian based) with EMVS. Really pretty.

 

[unhappy_mage]

Glad you like it, and congrats on setting it up! I'm looking to do sort of the same thing with a slightly lower budget.

Anyways, good luck with it, and post if you hit problems. The linux sub-forum is likely more suited to answering evms/samba/whatever questions.