Hey.. if you were going to load down a 2U with 3 drives in order to save space. How could you allow the server to automatically distribute the space as needed, i mean account setup will automatically go to the main drive, so when that drive is full, then what?

How could i manage all three drives automatically to be divided and used appropriately and still be able to move accounts around as i see fit?

I would recommend using Raid 5 if you are going to use 3 drives. For example, if you had 3 36G hard drives, you would end up with 72G of usable space and the remaining 36G of space is used for holding parity information in the event of drive failure.

yes but how do i set things up so that when i use my control pannel to create accounts it will automatically set the accounts up on drive 1 or 2 without me having to configure this...

IN other words i want it so that as drive 1 is full it will add accounts to drive 2 and as drive 2 is full it will use drive 3, with out me having to manually configure anything everytime...

see what i mean?
like on cpu when drive is full you have to select another directory, i want it to automaticaly do this,etc.

When you use raid 5, the server will only appear to have one hard drive...72G in size according to my example. There would be nother further required as far as account creation.

ahhh,, got ya.. think you!

hey with the above could i use 3 drives and have 1 raid,, or how could i do that.. i want 3 120GB drives,, what would i have to do in order to do the same as above with your example with these drives?

Raid 1 is drive mirroring. With drive mirroring you must have an even number of drives. Using your example, you would need 4 120G drives and this would yield 2 redundant 120G volumes with good fault tolerance. Using raid 5, with 3 120G volumes you would have 240G usable space and would have redundancy such that if you lost one of the three drives, your server would still run and you would NOT lose data. I did a search on google and found a decent site that explains some of this.

http://www.acnc.com/04_01_05.html

thank you

(Disclaimer: I don't actually run RAID, so what I speak from is just what I've learned over the years.)

I've always considered RAID 1 to be some sort of "outcast" -- I believe every other RAID level exists for redundancy in the event of a failure. RAID 1 just gives you really fast drives. The problem is that if a single drive in your RAID 1 stripeset fails, you apparentely lose the whole disk set -- you could almost say that RAID 1 increases your chance of failure over "JBOD" (Just a Bunch Of Disks), whereas the other RAID levels are designed so if a single disk fails, you chuck it, pop a new one in, and "rebuild" the disk's contents.

fog you're thinking of Raid 0 which provides no redundancy.

Fog I think your talking about Raid 0 Striping that is for speed that does double your chance's of failuse.... Raid 1 is mirroring and just keeps an exact copy of the hard drive on another drive. It won't speed up the hard drive at all.

Actually mirroring does increase drive reads, especially if the drives are on separate controllers....called duplexing.


This is making me feel really old. I used to have these same discussions 5-8 years ago when selling/installing novell servers

*sobs* You're right. I got my 1's and 0's mixed up. (Heh, I think I've just found a really good excuse for anything.)

Sorry for spreading misinformation. :bawling:

I wouldn't worry I remember rackshack made the same mistake on there page age's ago and in there chat room they wouldn't belive it that they where wrong till it was looked up.

For a nice RAID and storage primer, head here:

http://storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/perf/raid/index.html

I don't tink it'll automatically distrubite space, sort of like window,s you need to tell your ftp program where to put the files :)

I don't tink it'll automatically distrubite space

That's one of the basic premises of RAID -- it appears as one 'logical unit,' so you don't have to manually make backups or anything. Exactly what ends up on what drives depends on what type of RAID you're running, but the whole point of RAID is that it automatically 'copies' stuff and all.

Raid 1 is drive mirroring. With drive mirroring you must have an even number of drives. Using your example, you would need 4 120G drives and this would yield 2 redundant 120G volumes with good fault tolerance


4 x 120G drives in RAID 1 is just 120G mirrored on all 4 drives. You can have 3 drives in RAID 1. What you get is same 120G mirrored on 3 drives.

What i need if possible is this...

2 of the 120GB drives to appear as one and to be completely backed up and fault tolerant...

The 3rd could be used for some type of raid solution..

What Raid level should i be looking at?

5