Dell 530 RAID 5 Recommendations

[Robert Slade]

On Sun, 2006-02-12 at 02:19, Matt Sullivan wrote:
> I am considering using FreeBSD 6 on an old Dell Precision Workstation 
> 530 MT.
> It has Dual Xeon 1.5 GHz CPUs, 4 x Fujitsu AIC-7892A MAJ3182M SCSI HDs,
> 1 GB RDRAM, Nvidia Elsa Gloria II Pro video, Integrated 3Com NIC,
> Lynksys Wireless-G USB network adapter, and Integrated
> Adaptec AIC-7892 SCSI controller.
> 
> I would like to setup RAID 5.  The intended use is in my home network as
> a personal SOA/J2EE/MySQL development box and family file server.
> 
> Please review and comment on my assumptions:
> 1) FreeBSD 6-STABLE has fixed any 5.X SMP issues.

There was a problem but this was fixed at 5.4. There are odd reports of
problems with older hardware. I have had a problem with an oldish quad
Compaq machine which I have not had time to get to the bottom of. 
> 2) I will need an additional RAID controller card.
> 3) FreeBSD has issues similar to the folks at OpenBSD (my firewall OS)
>     regarding Adaptec - http://www.openbsd.org/i386.html:
>     we do not recommend the Adaptec cards for use.
>     * Adaptec AAC-2622, AAC-364, AAC-3642, 2200S, 2410SA, 2610SA, 
> 2810SA, 21610SA

Have a look at the hardware compat list at
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/6.0R/hardware-i386.html
this may help with the raid card.


> I would appreciate some recommendations with a focus on price/performance.
> 
> Thanks,
> Matt
> 

Matt,

One thought I would separate the file server support from a development
machine. You may get into speed problems when heavily loaded. For my
network I use 2 modest machines with large IDE drives running a HA setup
as a file server. They sync to each other via a Gigbyte direct Ethernet
connection and if one goes down or if off line for maintenance the other
takes over. See http://linux-ha.org/ .

Rob