home server set-up
 

As part of a kitchen remodel, I have been pulling cat 5e cable through out the house. I want to set-up a home server with samba on a linux box to support 3 windows PCs (2 wired and 1 wireless). I have an old Athlon 600 mhz cpu with an Asus K7V mobo, 512 MB ram, and 16 MB Matrox Millenium G400 video card. For data protection I plan on running RAID 1 which would mean adding a pci RAID card. (I recently purchased 2 300 GB Seagate EIDE drives.) I plan on using the Fedora distro because there is documentation on operating mythTV on Fedora, a long term goal.

Is my old computer up to what I have planned? Is it better to have native mobo RAID support vs. pci card (from what I have read, 3ware RAID pci cards work well but are kind of $$)?

Any other suggestions?

That's plenty of machine for a Samba server. 3ware cards are slick but may be a bit of overkill. Have you considered using a software raid??

Depending on your demands from your other machines running off the server, running MythTV eventually off the same box as that running your Samba shares might be a bit too much. There's plenty of RAM to make up for the slower processor, so should just about be able to handle MythTV without too many problems, but moving large amounts of data cross your network at the same time might slow it down. As a starting point, it's more than good enough and is giving you plenty of storage space too!

Thanks for the input. Regarding software raid, how does the reliability and performance of software raid compare to a hardware (pci) raid? I have bad, old memories of software modems versus hardware modems

I've ran Gigabye + Asus system boards with their onboard RAID controllers and never had a problem compared to a PCI expansion card. I suppose the advantage of software RAID is you don't need hard drives of equal sizes (I think). A decent system board with onboard chip should handle it fine for what you're looking at doing.

fouldsy's correct about unequal size HDDs. At work we, as a habit leave about 5% of the original drives unpartitioned so if sometime in the future a drive goes bad and we can't find an exact size replacement we're not stuck with a lot of extra work.

You've got wayyyy enough machine for your samba server.

I run samba on a 150mhz 32mbRam pentium. It's also a firewall, mysql server, web-server, dns, and dhcp server. It's headless: if you take out xserver and any gui, it's surprising what some old hardware can do..! There's only a couple users at any given time, though.

Software RAID simply means that the RAID is handled by the OS, not an external card. There's a little bit of extra overhead, but it's perfectly reliable and would work well for your situation.