large filesystem & fileserver architecture issues.

[Mark Hahn]

> SuperMicro X5DAE Motherboard
> dual Xeon 2.8GHz processors
> 2 GB Kingston Registered ECC RAM
> 2 HighPoint RocketRAID 404 4-channel IDE RAID adapters
> 10 Maxtor 250 GB 7200 RPM disks
> 1 Maxtor 60 GB drive for system work
> 1 long multi-drop disk power cable...
> SuperMicro case (nomenclature escapes me, however, it has 1 disk bays 
> and fits the X5DAE MoBo
> Cheapest PCI video card I could find (no integrated video on MoBo)
> Add-on Intel GBE SC fiber adapter
> 
> Drawbacks:
> 1.  I should have checked for integrated video for simplicity

I did something similar a little while back: a tyan thunder e7500 board,
just one Xeon, just 1G ram, integrated video/gigabit (copper), 3ware 8500-8 
in jbod mode, 8x200G WD JB disks and a ~500W PS.

I don't see any reason for adding extra ram or putting in multiple,
higher-powered CPUs for a fileserver.

> 2.  Current HighPoint drivers for RH9 are not RAID yet; use RH7.3 with 
> ALL the patches

I'll be doing more boxes, probably with something like 8x250 SATA disks,
with a pair of promise tx4 cards.  open-source drivers for these cards 
recently became available, btw.

there was a very interesting talk at OLS about doing raid intelligently
over a network...

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