[svlug] Lots o' disk space

[Skip Evans]

Hey all,

A friend of mine does video for a living and has 
amassed between 3 and 4 terabytes of data that 
currently reside on a plethora of external drives 
all over the place.

She'd like to put together a box to back it all up 
  too, so I did some Googling around and came 
across this article that makes it look pretty 
painless and straightforward.

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8590

(Can't go wrong with LJ, eh, Gridley?)

I have couple questions, though, before diving in.

1) The article was written in 2005, so while I'm 
sure the mechanics are still sound, I'm wondering 
if the current crop of distros (I'm sweet on 
Ubuntu these days), would make this set up even 
easier?

For example, suppose you have a box with one of 
these HBA cards mentioned in the article in it 
connected to 4 1TB drives.

If you were to pop a CD of Ubuntu 8.04 into the CD 
drive might it come up and say something like 
"Boy, you've got a lot of drives in this thing? 
Would you like to use them all?"

I certainly have no qualms about using fdisk and 
mkfs like it says in the article, but I'm 
wondering if the latest distros would find the 
drives and do it all from the GUI install. Maybe 
the Ubuntu Sever distro?

Also, does anyone have any advice on the HBA 
cards? The article cites Promise Technologies, but 
in looking around for information I found 
recommendations for Tekram and Addonics as well.

Lastly, if the install is successful, and say 4 
1TB drives are all up and going, each on its own 
mount point, would Samba be a viable option to 
access them from an OS X machine for transferring 
video files.

Any input, comments, and wisdom appreciated.

Skip

-- 
Skip Evans
Big Sky Penguin, LLC
503 S Baldwin St, #1
Madison, WI 53703
608-250-2720
http://bigskypenguin.com
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