[svlug] SATA PCI controller, Mirroring solution

[RS]

On Fri, Mar 7, 2008 at 1:55 PM, Paul Reiber <reiber at gmail.com> wrote:

> A friend's looking to purchase a SATA PCI controller and drives.
>
> He's runnung Ubuntu 7.1 and would like to use it with internal
> and external disks.  His impression is that most controllers
> should be able to do that.


not sure what you mean? most external disks are either USB or
firewire...make sure that the controller is SATA II compliant



>
>
> If you have particularly good or particularly bad experiences with
> any specific vendor's STAT PCI controllers, please share the details.


The kernel should support most of the consumer brand PCI cards. I have had
good experiences with Highpoint (YMMV). These add-on cards are a tad
expensive...


>
>
> Next...
>
> He'd like to use Linux to mirror the SATA drives - sees it as the best
> option in case of a controller failure.  We're interested in learning
> which approaches people have had success with.


You mean disk failure. Theoretically, the controller is a single point of
failure. Linux software RAID works well. RAID 1 or RAID 1+0 depending on
your card should be OK. good guide here -
http://www.howtoforge.com/software-raid1-grub-boot-debian-etch


>
>
> Which linux utility you recommend?


mdadm toolset that comes free with ubuntu


>
> - Not necessarily free - willing to spend some money on the software
> - Reliability and compatibility more important than performance.


You might want to also research which file system to use in this scenario. I
know many people swear by ext3 (and rightly so). But, I know some folks who
see very good performance with XFS esp with TB sized setups....


>
>
> Thanks guys!
> -Paul http://Reiber.org
>
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