Linux software RAID + Hardware Q

Soldato
Joined
15 Sep 2003
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Hi,

I've got an old celeron 633 box running as a small file server, with 256mb ram. I was thinking of popping my SATA PCI card in it and running two 120gig drives over RAID0. So have a 40 gig root drive and a 240 gig raid0 drive.

Is it going to run like a dog with three legs missing?

Its got ubuntu server on it.

Cheers.

Jon
 
hi,

whats the load averages like at the moment?

whats it serving?

any increase in users for services that run on the server, ftp,httpd,dns,smb etc?

if it's ok now carn't see that the load would increase much.

cheers
deno
 
Load is ok I think. Its got MySQL, Apache, Samba, FTP, Munin (can take off). Its only for a couple of people. Will have about 200gigs of music and files on it.

22:57:28 up 3:57, 2 users, load average: 2.19, 2.05, 1.86

Thats running an rsync backup? Never really been sure on what the load averages mean lol. Whats the highest number?
 
I had a 4-drive Linux software RAID5 array running on a P2-333 with 192MB RAM for about a year. Performance was better than I was expecting - no problems maxing out a 100MBit connection over Samba.

I wasn't really using it as anything other than a Samba share though.
 
Interesting stuff.

I've now pretty much sold the three 40gig drives that were in the unit so will probably give the raid a go. I don't have much to lose other than my spare time.
 
1.Mm, I would be wary of raid 0 if you don't have backups/value your data on that partition, as one drive failure would make data on both disks useless.

2. Why not just make it 2 separate drives, no raid, slightly safer, and I doubt performance would decrease - the drives are more than fast enough, your bottleneck would be PCI/network speed. You can also manually load balance (incoming/temp/live files on one disk (high fragmentation) and movies /music on the other disk.

3. Lastly you could mirror, this would give redundancy and faster reads (in theory, but see point above), but you lose half your drive space..

As much As I would like to do point 3, I can't afford double drive space - I don't value the data on it /that/ much.

I have run a 3x 160Gig setup as Raid0 before and when it went screwy It was a nervous time, fortunately I manged to get the drive to boot one last time and backup up my data.
 
I backup to an external 250gig usb drive so im not worried about raid0. I've got three froms of backup :P.

So far the raid is working well. Just moving some data around as we speak. It's working a treat.

The main reason for having raid0 is to just create one big share. I can't be bothered to have multiple shares. The drives im using have been raid0'd for a year or so now without a glitch.
 
JonRohan said:
Never really been sure on what the load averages mean lol. Whats the highest number?

see the top man page

but basically, the load average is the average number of processes in the queue waiting
for CPU time, over the last 1, 5, and 15 minutes.

Seen servers with +150 bloody nfs :)
 
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