Thoughts -> Re: classiccmp server

From: Doc Shipley <doc_at_mdrconsult.com>
Date: Mon Oct 4 11:18:08 2004

Jay West wrote:
> Why didn't I go raid in the first place......

> That all being said - here is a thought. Some time in the next couple weeks
> I'll make it down to the datacenter and dig into the classiccmp server and
> see exactly what is in there, how much space for drives & expansion cards,
> etc. I'll report that back to the list and we can decide what to do. Lots of
> people paypal'd me to cover the cost of the drive - and provided well over
> the cost of the drive. I was going to set that money aside for future
> classiccmp upgrades at first thought... It's up to the people who
> contributed of course (I don't want to switch the goal after just getting
> the contributions)... but perhaps I should use the overage to upgrade the
> server with regards to raid-X and/or sata...

   I'm going to suggest a bigger case, to start with.

   My company runs and manages more IDE-based servers and firewalls than
is reasonable, and we *very* rarely see the frequency of drive failures
that you're getting. When we do, it's invariably thermal issues in 1U
rack cases. A lot of the 1U cases just don't provide adequate cooling
for high-activity, high-RPM drives.

   As a matter of fact, I have a 4U PC case sitting here - no rails -
that CC can have for shipping. It's got fans enough to cool a VW. :)

   I'm also going to stroke one of my pet peeves while we're here.
Don't buy a motherboard with IDE RAID and plan to use it as RAID.
Almost all the onboard chipsets use *the OS drivers* to do RAID. Yes, I
know you set up stripes or mirrors in firmware and all that jazz.
Still, when your OS (Linux or *BSD) sees the RAID members instead of or
in addition to the RAID LUN, it's not frickin hardware RAID. Promise,
Belkin, Highpoint, all use OS-level drivers to do the work.

   Do I remember you run FreeBSD? Set up a nice SATA pair or triplet
and run software RAID. The performance will be comparable, and I'm
betting that the recovery and management tools are considerably better
than what any of the cheap IDE "RAID" adapters provide.

   If you want IDE or SATA hardware RAID, go 3ware. They rock.


        Doc
Received on Mon Oct 04 2004 - 11:18:08 BST