[TriLUG] seeking HW recommendations -- byo RAID systems

[Ryan Leathers]

I have had great success with Tyan MBs for my home brew server class
machines.  I've also had good success with them in meeting my
specifications at a price I could live with. 

On Sat, 2004-05-08 at 14:10, Jason Tower wrote:
> there aren't a whole lot of motherboards with dual gig-e and 64-bit pci 
> slots, certainly not inexpensive ones.  by the time you get one, a big 
> case, high capacity power supply, CPU, ram, etc. you're looking at a 
> fairly hefty price tag.
> 
> my suggestion is to find a slightly older server (most have 64-bit pci 
> slots, and often dual or gig-e ethernet) and use that instead of trying 
> to roll your own.  you'll get lots of disk space, solid power supplies, 
> good cooling, etc, without trying to reinvent the wheel yourself.  let 
> us know how it turns out!
> 
> jason
> 
> On Saturday 08 May 2004 13:05, Ed Hill wrote:
> > Hi folks,
> >
> > I recently built (OK, threw together) a couple of 1--2TB array
> > systems with 300GB WD 5400rpm drives and 3ware PATA RAID cards. 
> > Given the franken-box nature of the systems (built from the failed
> > nodes of one of our clusters), I'm happy that they work and thrilled
> > that they seem to get good performance (>100MB/s sustained writes
> > with RAID0).
> >
> > So now I'd like to either buy or build a few more and want to
> > maximize our bang-for-buck in storage capacity.  I like the 3ware
> > "raid drive cages":
> >
> >   http://www.3ware.com/products/ata.asp
> >
> > and want to assemble boxes with 2--4 of these cages per box.  Can
> > anyone recommend a motherboard that has the following features:
> >
> >   - works nicely with Linux (preferably, a 2.6.x kernel)
> >   - 2+ 64bit PCI adapters
> >   - 1--2 on-board GigE adapters
> >   - relatively cheap (we do NOT need dual CPUs)
> >
> > and does anyone have a favorite server case (rack-mount or not) that
> > would work for this purpose?
> >
> > Or should we just buy pre-built RAID systems?  I'm fond of the idea
> > of building our own since it seems significantly cheaper.  And we
> > don't need the dual-CPU power/expense that most turn-key RAID systems
> > provide.
> >
> > Ed
-- 
Ryan Leathers <ryan.leathers at globalknowledge.com>
Global Knowledge