[geeks] Big Damn File System....

[Kris Kirby]

On Mon, 18 Jun 2001, Joshua D. Boyd wrote:
> Personally, I just upgraded my file server to a "whopping" 32gigs (30gig
> data drive, 2 gig boot) in a P75.  Still don't have a good backup system
> yet.

... Which is precisely why you use RAID5. :-) I had the misfortune of
loosing one hard drive of a two drive stripe set. The resulting MP3
rebuilt took about two weeks, four-to-six hours a day; eight hours a
day on the weekend. Rebuilt it with a software RAID5. On a AMD-K5/75. (Why
K5? 'Cause, it cracks RC5 keys faster than the Pentium 90.) Machine can
only get about ~1.5 MB/s-~3MB/s, which is fine for MP3 playback.

Don't let the Napster folks get you down. Having just encoded ~112 CDs of
audio to MP3, I can tell you that Napster (what it used to be) is a *huge*
savings of CPU time, if you can deal with the fact that you can't screen
the quality of an MP3 until it's downloaded. (I'm fascist: 256Kbit/s.)

OTOH, my file server used to be a TuCows mirror wearing three 20GB (Two
IBM and one Quantum) drives in a three-drive stripe. Can do about
1.5MB/s, that's it. Very unimpressive, but freaking huge. "Boot" drive is
6BG, for a total of 66GB of storage. Nice to be able to expand large
images and not be crunched for space.

-----
Kris Kirby, KE4AHR          | TGIFreeBSD... 'Nuff said.
<kris at nospam.catonic.net>   |    
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"Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony."