Hardware RAID and recommended controllers
Hi, new here, not new to Linux but a bit out of practice.
I'm getting ready to replace my old software RAID fileserver that's been around since '01 with a new box, and I'd like to make it as intuitive to operate once running as possible. Hardware wise, I'm looking at eight drives. Two small drives mirrored for the OS, five very large ( 1.5TB or 2TB ) drives RAID5, and one more drive like the five online as a hot spare. As for the rest of the computer, I've got a dual-Xeon 2.4GHz Socket 603 board and chips laying around, with 5 or 6 64 bit PCI-X slots, so I figured that I'd look for a controller that fits that board.
What I'm looking to find out is what distributions have good RAID tools for things like identifying drives as they go bad, switching over to rebuild the array off of a hot spare, etc, and what hardware would work best? I know that SAS will use SATA drives, so I'm probably going to go that way if I can find software to do this.
Most of my experience is with Debian, though I started with Slack and tried Redhat 5.1 and SuSE before ending up with Debian.
Comments
Additionally, I believe the driver will log errors (drive failures and such) to syslog or /var/log/messages. With a file watcher, or splunk, you can easily trap the error and notify.
As mentioned by dmjedli, 3ware has a command line interface utility called tw_cli. I wrote a simple bash script to periodically check the status of the RAID and if there is an issue I get a message sent to me. It works extremely well and has been rock solid for our purposes. 3ware also provides a web interface called 3DM2 that allows you to monitor the status of the RAID and perform various tasks.
Openfiler is great to present storage. But, if you're looking for something to present iSCSI LUNS to ESX, XEN, or even a CIFS file share for a business, it should be backed by a good hardware RAID card.
Openfiler can stripe across block level disks, but it's still a software RAID.
Now I just have to see if that fiberoptic module for my switch is still available. I have a PCI-X nic for the server, but something to hook it to would be nice...
So far parts that I already have (and have had for quite some time) include Supermicro P4DP6 motherboard, 8GB RAM, two Prestonia DP2200 Xeon processors, and an appropriate power supply.
I'm looking at a 3ware 9550SXU-8LP controller, which one e-bay vendor has for $299, a pair of cheap small 100gb or so SATA hard disk drives mirrored for the OS, and I'm still trying to figure out what large drives I'd like to buy five or six of. Seagate and Western Digital both seem to have 1.5TB+ drives, but both have a lot of negative reviews on them as well, and if I'm going to put something like this together I need it to be as reliable as possible. I do suppose that I could always change my array configuration if going with a slightly smaller drive would mean more reliable choices.
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