[rescue] Friend needs storage solution

[David Stipp]

On Tue, May 30, 2006 at 10:45:25AM -0400, Patrick Giagnocavo wrote:
>I suggest OpenSolaris + ZFS.  The commands are simple and the ability to
>add storage later is a big plus.  Also ZFS has a built-in integrity
>checker option to ensure that blocks written are consistent.
>
>Get an old machine, put a bunch of IDE or SATA drives in it, install,
>you are done.  Anything with 256MB RAM and a P3-500 CPU or so will work
>fine.

I just setup a fileserver this weekend.  I *was* going to roll with
Solaris Express + ZFS, however, the driver support for IDE controllers
is still very dissapointing.  My Promise Ultra 100 controllers would
show up, but the pci-ide driver would not attach.  (There is a trick
where you can pass the pci id to the pci-ide driver at boot and in the
eeprom, but this just led to a hard lockup on the system.) Let alone the
highpoint controller, which has no driver at all apparently.

So two failed ide controllers (a promise ata 100 and a cmd something or
the other), two failed maxtor drives (the advantage to picking up at B&M
during sales is the quick return policy...) I wound up using software
raid 5 under lunix with a promise ultra ata 100 and the motherboard's
onboard highpoint, with a 200gb maxtor attached to each channel.

Performance isn't great, but it's just going to be a media box anyways.
(mostly reading...)

Anyone else have any better luck than I did with IDE/PATA controllers
than I did?

dks

-- 
David Stipp <dstipp at coolhack.net>