Hi,
I am attempting to build a file server using a Pentium II 400, for my home office.
I want to build a RAID 5 array for data integrity. I have four 160Gig Western digital hard drives, and a couple of spare IDE controller cards that I would like to use. The controller cards are the issue.
They are ST-306 Ultra ATA-133 PCI cards from Lycom (see: http://www.lycom.com.tw/ST306.htm for card details).
The chipset is a Silicon Image Sil0680ACL144.
I installed one of these cards with a hard drive attached to test if it would work, but had no luck. I ran the Fedora Core 3 installer and the card was not detected. I was not able to find a driver to manually select that looked right.
I spent some time on Google researching Linux and this card/chipset, but found no real clues. Only windows drivers seem to be available.
Can anyone tell me if this card is likely to be usable?
If not, could anyone suggest a low cost card that can handle the drives I have?
Warning: I am a relative newbie with Linux. I have built a couple of systems over the last year or so, but am by no means an expert.
Any assistance, or suggestions greatly appreciated.
Regards, Langdon
You want to RAID5 640 Gb worth of drives on a Pentium II, 400 MHz machine? I'm not a RAID expert. I question whether doing it on an old, slow machine with large drives is practical. It seems to me you would simply saturate the PCI bus. I read a magazine article (Maximum PC?) that tested onboard hardware RAID solutions and they had trouble with multiple drives in RAID5 on certain modern motherboards.
I've done software RAID 1 in Red Hat Linux using two, 120 Gb drives with good results, but I had a fast machine and that makes a difference. This was after trying to implement hardware RAID on an onboard Promise PDC20276 controller and failing. I haven't tried it on a Pentium II.
I think you should try software RAID on a faster machine. Heck, maybe you'll get by doing software RAID 1 on 2 disks on the Pentium II. The size of the drives might just keep that old CPU busy for ages.
Bob
Langdon Stevenson wrote:
Hi,
I am attempting to build a file server using a Pentium II 400, for my home office.
I want to build a RAID 5 array for data integrity. I have four 160Gig Western digital hard drives, and a couple of spare IDE controller cards that I would like to use. The controller cards are the issue.
They are ST-306 Ultra ATA-133 PCI cards from Lycom (see: http://www.lycom.com.tw/ST306.htm for card details).
The chipset is a Silicon Image Sil0680ACL144.
I installed one of these cards with a hard drive attached to test if it would work, but had no luck. I ran the Fedora Core 3 installer and the card was not detected. I was not able to find a driver to manually select that looked right.
I spent some time on Google researching Linux and this card/chipset, but found no real clues. Only windows drivers seem to be available.
Can anyone tell me if this card is likely to be usable?
If not, could anyone suggest a low cost card that can handle the drives I have?
Warning: I am a relative newbie with Linux. I have built a couple of systems over the last year or so, but am by no means an expert.
Any assistance, or suggestions greatly appreciated.
Regards, Langdon
Robert L Cochran wrote:
You want to RAID5 640 Gb worth of drives on a Pentium II, 400 MHz machine? I'm not a RAID expert. I question whether doing it on an old, slow machine with large drives is practical. It seems to me you would simply saturate the PCI bus.
Depends. (And I know the Original Poster later said performance wasn't critical...)
Firstly, unlike certain OSes, Linux should find that a Pentium II is fine for shoving data around. It's not like it needs to do complex calculations on each byte: it shouldn't even need to examine each byte while reading.
Of course, while it's writing, something will have to calculate checksums: I don't think the Original Poster's suggested card has any RAID acceleration features.
Secondly, it depends exactly what you're going to put on that RAID array. If you're putting a mail server or a database on it, you'll almost certainly find that disk usage is dominated by lots and lots of small (~8K) reads. And you'll be very lucky to get more than about 150 of those per second on ATA drives.
It's all about physics: on a hard disk that spins about 100 times per second, a particular byte only goes near the read heads once every 10 ms. And no matter how fast the rest of the computer is, 10 ms is an age in computing. Database administrators swear by the "number of spindles", for this reason: I've got much chunkier disk arrays on not much faster systems. (They also swear *at* RAID 5 for a lot of usages...)
And 8K times 150 transfers per second = 1200 K/s per disk: that's not going to set anything on fire.
(The Original Poster mentioned SAMBA, but it still depends on what sort of files are being stored).
Thirdly, on a slow PCI implementation, you're going to get 90 - 100 MB/s of usable bandwidth. Hard drives are only just going past the 70 MB/s at peak performance. At the best of times, you are going to be limited by the PCI bus, but you're still going to get better than a single drive on the latest systems.
Of course, on a Samba server, you're going to be sharing that bandwidth with the network card (on a PII 400). If that's gigabit, then yes, that's going to halve the available bandwidth and slow things down. If it's only 100 Mbit/s, then that's 12.5 MB/s max, and that's your bottleneck: that's the physical maximum you'll get out of the system.
(When did 100 Mbit/s become "only"?)
But this is why PCI Express is a Good Thing. It's designed for this sort of job: a separate network card and a separate fast hard drive adapter. The bandwidth isn't shared: they each get their own 2.5 Gbit/s per lane in each direction. Although you might *still* need more than 1x PCIe for the hard drive adapter...
James.
On Monday 06 December 2004 11:12, Langdon Stevenson wrote:
I am attempting to build a file server using a Pentium II 400, for my home office.
For software, I recommend you look at Clark Connect - www.clarkconnect.org. It's a compilation of Linux software aimed at your needs and contains software not included in FC/RHEL.
I want to build a RAID 5 array for data integrity. I have four 160Gig Western digital hard drives, and a couple of spare IDE controller cards that I would like to use. The controller cards are the issue.
I wonder whether you're going to more trouble than it's worth; a Pentium II 400 has heaps of power for the typical small office, but it's old and not the hardware base I'd expect someone to choose for a high-availability system.
If you really want RAID with lots of disks, I think you should be buying a new small SCSI server. Dell, IBM and Sun all have such systems, and in some cases with Linux preinstalled.
If you wish to persist with this system, then install one )not two) drive per ATA connector, and use skinny cables. With the standard wide cables you are going to have ventilation problems.
I have an Abit Hotrood 66 card which uses a Promise HPT chipset; it's old, and I had to use a 2.3 kernel when I first bought it because 2.2 didn't have the support.
With your Pentium II, disk performance may be an issue. I find individual disks mostly run at twice the speed in my Athlon 1400 that they do in my Pentium IIs. I had a couple of drives in a Pentium II running about 23 Mbytes/sec but I get 40 and up in the Athlon, and the latest drives better 50.
A drive that gave me 17 Mbytes/sec in a Pentium II on the Hotrod card did about 38 on the same card in my Athlon system.
I presume that if you're using 16 Gb drives that throughput is important to you.
Warning: I am a relative newbie with Linux. I have built a couple of systems over the last year or so, but am by no means an expert.
I recommend you get your experience on something less critical to your financia well-being:-) Clark Connect is a pre-packaged software set aimed at small offices.
Further, check out the Clark Connect site for lists, join one and ask what hardware they recommend, and what people do for backup.
Remember, the most common cause of lost data is deletion by some twit five seconds before he realises he's a twit. RAID won't help with that, but simple backups will.
Thanks for the feedback John
I had a look at Clark Connect, but they don't really have anything to offer me. I am attempting to build a cheap Samba file server with large capacity and reasonable redundancy. Throughput isn't an issue, and I don't need any services other than Samba on it.
I can't justify forking out for a new piece of hardware, but have a bunch of components that will do the job if I can get them to play nicely.
From you reply I take it that IDE controllers that use a Promise HPT (HighPoint?) chipset are supported by Linux. Is that the case?
Regards, Langdon
John Summerfield wrote:
On Monday 06 December 2004 11:12, Langdon Stevenson wrote:
I am attempting to build a file server using a Pentium II 400, for my home office.
For software, I recommend you look at Clark Connect - www.clarkconnect.org. It's a compilation of Linux software aimed at your needs and contains software not included in FC/RHEL.
I want to build a RAID 5 array for data integrity. I have four 160Gig Western digital hard drives, and a couple of spare IDE controller cards that I would like to use. The controller cards are the issue.
Langdon Stevenson wrote:
Thanks for the feedback John
I had a look at Clark Connect, but they don't really have anything to offer me. I am attempting to build a cheap Samba file server with large capacity and reasonable redundancy. Throughput isn't an issue, and I don't need any services other than Samba on it.
I can't justify forking out for a new piece of hardware, but have a bunch of components that will do the job if I can get them to play nicely.
From you reply I take it that IDE controllers that use a Promise HPT (HighPoint?) chipset are supported by Linux. Is that the case?
Langdon,
Contrary to what has already been said, I believe that you should be fine runing Samba on RAID5 with a PII 400. Sure, it's not going to set the world on fire but, once the array has built the CPU should be plenty fast enough to keep up with updates.
I would echo the recommendation to keep the disks on separate controllers; if you put two on the same channel then one disk failing will most likely lock up the channel resulting in you losing two disks and therefore your whole array.
I can't offer any advice regarding whether or not the chipset is supported, but if you've got the cards and disks why not connect it all up and attempt an install?
Personally, I run a 6x250GB Maxtor SATA drives on 2 x Promise SATA150 TX4 controllers. I have partitioned each drive identically with a 1.5GB partition (/dev/sd[abcdef]1) and a 248.5 GB (/dev/sd[abcdef]2). It is not possible to boot of RAID5 so I created a RAID1 mirror from /dev/sd[ad]1 and installed the base system there. I then created an huge RAID5 array from /dev/sd[abcdef] and used lvm to create logical volumes for /usr (10GB), /var (5GB) and /home (915GB). I mounted these and migrated /usr and /var off the root partition.
Hope this is useful,
R.
Robin Bowes wrote:
Langdon Stevenson wrote:
Thanks for the feedback John
I had a look at Clark Connect, but they don't really have anything to offer me. I am attempting to build a cheap Samba file server with large capacity and reasonable redundancy. Throughput isn't an issue, and I don't need any services other than Samba on it.
I can't justify forking out for a new piece of hardware, but have a bunch of components that will do the job if I can get them to play nicely.
From you reply I take it that IDE controllers that use a Promise HPT (HighPoint?) chipset are supported by Linux. Is that the case?
Langdon,
Contrary to what has already been said, I believe that you should be fine runing Samba on RAID5 with a PII 400. Sure, it's not going to set the world on fire but, once the array has built the CPU should be plenty fast enough to keep up with updates.
I would echo the recommendation to keep the disks on separate controllers; if you put two on the same channel then one disk failing will most likely lock up the channel resulting in you losing two disks and therefore your whole array.
I can't offer any advice regarding whether or not the chipset is supported, but if you've got the cards and disks why not connect it all up and attempt an install?
Personally, I run a 6x250GB Maxtor SATA drives on 2 x Promise SATA150 TX4 controllers. I have partitioned each drive identically with a 1.5GB partition (/dev/sd[abcdef]1) and a 248.5 GB (/dev/sd[abcdef]2). It is not possible to boot of RAID5 so I created a RAID1 mirror from /dev/sd[ad]1 and installed the base system there. I then created an huge RAID5 array from /dev/sd[abcdef] and used lvm to create logical volumes for /usr (10GB), /var (5GB) and /home (915GB). I mounted these and migrated /usr and /var off the root partition.
Hope this is useful,
R.
I will not get to techo .. since I am not .... but I have a machine running FC3 ... older Dell PII 400 - 192ram. that runs gnome just fine... it is a little slow at times.. but it is better than XP.
T
Hi Terry
I will not get to techo .. since I am not .... but I have a machine running FC3 ... older Dell PII 400 - 192ram. that runs gnome just fine... it is a little slow at times.. but it is better than XP.
The past four years I have been served quite nicely by a Pentium 233. It has a pair of IDE drives set up with RAID 1. Its a neat little box that cost me almost nothing and continues to do good service. Just a little short of disk space as it can only address about 30 gigs or so.
Its gratifying what you can achieve with throw-away hardware sometimes.
Regards, Langdon
On Mon, 2004-12-06 at 12:11, John Summerfield wrote:
On Monday 06 December 2004 11:12, Langdon Stevenson wrote:
I want to build a RAID 5 array for data integrity. I have four 160Gig Western digital hard drives, and a couple of spare IDE controller cards that I would like to use. The controller cards are the issue.
I wonder whether you're going to more trouble than it's worth; a Pentium II 400 has heaps of power for the typical small office, but it's old and not the hardware base I'd expect someone to choose for a high-availability system.
400Mhz , to me is already mroe than enough power under the hood to serve as a file-server.
Remember, being a file-server, the necessary requirement is a fast disk and lots of memory. (smbd spawns ~2MB per connection)
I run mine on 3x 200GB PII 300Mhz w 512MB ram. Been serving the dept nicely.
I don't do raid, but I do keep a backup server handy that rsyncs every night.
If you really want RAID with lots of disks, I think you should be buying a new small SCSI server. Dell, IBM and Sun all have such systems, and in some cases with Linux preinstalled.
If I were you, I'll get a whitebox instead. Unless you're willing to pay a premium for Next_business_day etc... and SCSI, then whitebox will do find. TM anyway
If you wish to persist with this system, then install one )not two) drive per ATA connector, and use skinny cables. With the standard wide cables you are going to have ventilation problems.
I've got 2 fans sucking air out of the case, and 1 blowing straight onto the 3 HDs.
With your Pentium II, disk performance may be an issue. I find individual disks mostly run at twice the speed in my Athlon 1400 that they do in my Pentium IIs. I had a couple of drives in a Pentium II running about 23 Mbytes/sec but I get 40 and up in the Athlon, and the latest drives better 50.
/sbin/hdparm -tT /dev/hda
/dev/hda: Timing buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 1.50 seconds = 85.33 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 2.62 seconds = 24.43 MB/sec
It's old Hardware running on IDE. It's expected. Not Too Shabby though. (On a 10mbps lan)
-
James Wilkinson -
John Summerfield -
Langdon Stevenson -
Ow Mun Heng -
Robert L Cochran -
Robin Bowes -
Terry R. Grier