Re: Promise SATA and SuSE 9.1
From: Alan Prescott (ajp_at_nospam.fudokai.org.uk)
Date: 07/17/04
- Next message: David E. Spence: "Re: No Internet connection"
- Previous message: Kevin Nathan: "Re: Canon 1850 Printer"
- In reply to: David Wright: "Re: Promise SATA and SuSE 9.1"
- Next in thread: Rich Piotrowski: "Re: Promise SATA and SuSE 9.1"
- Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]
Date: Sat, 17 Jul 2004 07:37:00 +0100
David Wright wrote:
> Alan Prescott wrote:
>
>> I've stuck my neck out at work saying that I can build us a machine to
>> back up our windoze servers to using SuSE Linux and Samba. ATM I'm
>> planning on an Asus (P4C800) m/b with on-board Promise SATA controller to
>> handle 4 x
>> 250 Gb SATA disks. Does anyone know if SuSE 9.1 will install onto a SATA
>> only system? Known problems/fixes etc. appreciated.
>> - Alan
>
> This machine is running an Asus A8V AMD64 motherboard with an onboard
> Promise RAID controller with a pair of Samsung drives connect... Although
> at the moment not used as RAID.
>
> Windows threw up a stink and refused to believe that the machine possessed
> a hard drive, while SuSE just waltzed on ahead and blithely installed onto
> the SATA drive as if it hadn't a care in the world...
>
> I believe that the RAID on the onboard controllers are not real RAID's,
> but (Windows) software RAIDS (can somebody correct me on this point?)
> which aren't fully supported by SuSE. Reading between the lines, it would
> be better to format the drives individually and make a Linux software
> RAID.
>
> The motherboard has Promise and VIA SATA controllers, so that will allow a
> maximum of 4 drives to be connected via SATA (SATA does not support the
> master/slave relationship, each port on the motherboard supports 1 drive),
> if they are all put into a RAID array or pair of mirrored stripes, for
> example, you could connect a normal PATA drive to the IDE controller and
> use that as a boot drive...
>
> What you are suggesting is certainly possible and setting up a mechanism
> to back the data via Samba to the new machine should be relatively simple.
>
> I assume from the way you are describing the situation, you are working
> for a relatively small company. Make sure you buy a proper server case
> with plenty of cooling capacity, especially around the drives, they can
> get mighty warm when running together (saying that, the Samsungs seem to
> run fairly cool in their ICY Docks). But the case has 8 external drive
> bays and only every other one is used. It runs cool and quiet.
>
> Also, consider if you need fault tolerance. A good server case will over
> redundant power supplies, but do you also need hot-swap capability on the
> drives? Or can the server be taken down when a drive fails? If it is
> mission critical, you will need to look beyond a simple P4C800 board and
> look at a server board, ECC memory and a proper RAID controller which
> allows the drives to be hot-swapped.
>
> The difference between a desktop and a server is more than the number of
> disk drives and the configuration of the operating system. There is a good
> reason why servers cost several times what an equivalently specified
> (processing power and disk space) desktop would cost (although the asking
> prices of the Dell's, HP's and IBM's of this world still look steep even
> for servers...).
>
> Dave
Thanks - this sounds like the info I was after. Yes it's a small company (at
least as far as spending dosh on IT goes - unless it's a Blackberry system
for the board!).
The idea of this machine is as a sort of buffer for the tape backup. IOW use
Varitas to backup the main servers to this machine (quick) overnight, then
backup this machine to tape at leisure during the day.
I'm not bothered about RAID as it will not be a mission-critical beast - if
it dies we just go back to straight tape backup until it's rebuilt - or
perhaps get the capex to build 2 of them for redundancy (but only after it
breaks!).
- Alan
-- email =~ s/nospam//
- Next message: David E. Spence: "Re: No Internet connection"
- Previous message: Kevin Nathan: "Re: Canon 1850 Printer"
- In reply to: David Wright: "Re: Promise SATA and SuSE 9.1"
- Next in thread: Rich Piotrowski: "Re: Promise SATA and SuSE 9.1"
- Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]
Relevant Pages
|
