Building a file server - advice please

Hi,

I've been asked to set up a large file server for a friend who needs
humungous amounts of easily and quickly accessible filestore, with the
ability to swap drives in and out using drive caddys for backup and
transfer purposes.

The case I've got will allow up to 5 internal hard drives (or 4 plus a
floppy drive), and two caddys for exchangable drives, plus a CD drive.

Obviously I've decided to use linux for this as RISCOS isn't really
suitable.

I therefore have a couple of questions about the best way to go about
this:

First off, do I need a floppy drive? The case is designed to be able to
take either a floppy or a hard drive in that bay, and to be honest I've
never yet seen anything in linux that suggests a floppy is necessary.

Second, can I add a second IDE card to drive an extra four devices -
does linux recognise HDE/HDF/HDG/HDH, or would I be better off with a
SCSI card and drives? (Our finances are somewhat limited, and we
already have most of the drives as IDE, so we would prefer to go with
IDE).

For reference, the PC motherboard has a 1mhz AMD and 256mb ram. The
main boot disc will hopefully be a 40gb drive - we've got it, but it's
not been tested yet! - and the remaining drives will all be circa
250gb+. We currently have 3*250gb drives plus 1*300gb drive, the 300gb
is currently unused, the others are all currently formatted as NTFS and
are in two windoze boxes. We /think/ we have enough space elsewhere to
empty one of these drives completely so that it can be reformatted as
ext3(?)

Given all this, how would you recommend we proceed and partition the
drives?

Most of the space will need to be as part of /home/xxx, but we may need
to make some/all of this available via http - we're not sure yet on
this point.

Also, this will (probably) be the only linux box on the network. All
the other boxes will be either windoze or RISCOS.

Any advice gratefully appreciated.

Dave

.

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