From owner-freebsd-isp Mon Mar 10 5: 5:54 2003 Delivered-To: freebsd-isp@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 58F7837B401 for ; Mon, 10 Mar 2003 05:05:52 -0800 (PST) Received: from mail.trident-uk.co.uk (mail.trident-uk.co.uk [81.3.89.57]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A621C43F75 for ; Mon, 10 Mar 2003 05:05:51 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from jamie@tridentmicrosystems.co.uk) Received: from localhost (localhost.pe.trident-uk.co.uk [127.0.0.1]) by mail.trident-uk.co.uk (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2A0DD1031; Mon, 10 Mar 2003 13:05:01 +0000 (GMT) Received: from jamieheckford (wrkstn-74.pe.trident-uk.co.uk [192.168.100.74]) by mail.trident-uk.co.uk (Postfix) with ESMTP id 878A4100F; Mon, 10 Mar 2003 13:05:00 +0000 (GMT) Reply-To: From: "Jamie Heckford" To: "'Troy Settle'" , Subject: RE: Mail Storage Reccomendations (3Ware vs Adaptec vs ....) Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2003 13:03:05 -0000 Organization: Trident Microsystems Ltd. Message-ID: <014f01c2e705$63d436e0$4a64a8c0@jamieheckford> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook, Build 10.0.3416 Importance: Normal X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2800.1106 In-Reply-To: <002201c2e703$cabdcdf0$aa8ffea9@abyss> X-Virus-Scanned: by AMaViS perl-11 Sender: owner-freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.org > The question of the day, is do I build a 3ware RAID5 solution > (with like 7*40GB drives of RAID5 and a hot spare), or do I > stick with SCSI with something like a Supermicro server > (http://www.supermicro.com/PRODUCT/SUPERServer/SuperServer6021H.htm) > with an Adaptec U160 0-channel RAID controller and 5*36GB and > a hot spare. > > Besides NFS, this machine will also be running a MySQL server > with 1 or 2 very small databases (for storing the vpopmail database). > > Comments? > > How well does the Adaptec stuff work? I've used their 2940 > controllers, but never their RAID stuff. If I should stay > away from Adaptec, what other solutions are reccomended for > U160 or U320 RAID5? > One solution I used (once upin a time) was to build 2x huge SCSI RAID5 servers. They had Mylex cards (can't remember the model - but they had a nice amount of cache). These acted as NFS servers for pretty much everything (Bar MySQL tables). Mail was nice and speedy, however it were only doing around the 30Gig a day (SMTP) traffic mark, don't know what your usage is. The reason I built two of them was to rsync between the two around 1am (GigE on the NFS servers). Then if one of my machines and data was lost, I at least had some form of on-site backup. If one of the machines were lost, simply shutdown and swap the drives. Of course this depends on your budget, but you should be able to make do with one of these sort of machines, you have the RAID5 there for your data which is the important things. In regards to adaptec RAID cards, I only tried one of the AAA cards, which had flaky support at the time, so don't know much about them im afraid. Cheers, Jamie To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-isp" in the body of the message