From owner-freebsd-questions Fri May 10 10:41:30 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mail.marketwatchmail.com (mail.marketwatchmail.com [206.146.143.85]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 59DED37B406 for ; Fri, 10 May 2002 10:41:23 -0700 (PDT) Received: (qmail 27534 invoked from network); 10 May 2002 18:24:20 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO maustad) (206.147.106.71) by mail.marketwatchmail.com with SMTP; 10 May 2002 18:24:20 -0000 From: "Jay Austad" To: "'Mikhail Kruk'" , Subject: RE: need advice on hardware for a server Date: Fri, 10 May 2002 12:41:18 -0500 Message-ID: <54180709DD3FE145917BB165AFE7EFA007256F39@mspexch2.office.mktw.net> 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 10.0.2627 Importance: Normal X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2600.0000 In-Reply-To: Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG I've had good luck with Dell equipment. You can get a Dell 1650 starting at $1499, and add all sorts of stuff including a RAID controller and up to 3 73GB 15k RPM drives. Basically, to config the RAID, you create the container through the BIOS when booting (not the system bios, the raid bios). Once your container is created, the OS will simply see it as one drive. Also, if you're looking for high performance, do not use raid-5. While reads are quite fast, writes on RAID-5 are very slow. Usually RAID 0+1 or RAID 10 offer you the best performance and the most redundancy, but you need a minimum of 4 drives for either of these, and the 1650's will only hold 3 drives. You could upgrade to 2550's though. They are fairly cheap, and they will hold 5 drives I think. I don't think the RAID cards on the 2550's will do RAID 10, so you'd have to use 0+1. RAID 0 == devil. Jay > -----Original Message----- > From: Mikhail Kruk [mailto:meshko@cs.brandeis.edu] > Sent: Friday, May 10, 2002 12:07 PM > To: questions@freebsd.org > Subject: need advice on hardware for a server > > > Hi, > I'm looking for an advice for a server we are going to get. > It will be a pretty busy mailserver. The price should be > under 4K. I would like to have a hardware RAID, so this is my > main question. > The most important for us is problem-free install. This is kind of > an emergency project and a lot of develpoment still has to be > done, so we > need something that will work out of the box. > > I would also appreciate pointers to some tutorials on how to setup a > system with a hardware RAID. Would it be detected by install? > Do I have to > install on a regular disk first and then configure it to use RAID? > > TIA! > -m > > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message