Hello.

Well, it's finally happened, my data IDE drive has finally died. (May it rest in peace).

Okay moving on... I want to move over to a SCSI RAID-0 setup.
The main reason I want to do this is to get some experience playing around with RAID. (That and I'd like to see what kind of a performance boost I get by using it.)

I've read the linux howto's on RAID and now I just need some help with the basic configuration. Here's the drive schema I have in mind:

/dev/hda --> primary (bootable) drive 200GB with '/ ' '/usr/local' '/home' partitions on it
/dev/hdc --> IDE cdrom
/dev/md0 --> the RAID-0 146 GB with only '/data' on it

The RAID partition will only contain a mysql database that I'll query using scripts from my home space on the IDE drive. I don't know if I'll be taking a hit in terms of performance by doing this (suggestions?), but from what I've read it seems easier to set things up this way.


The disks I'll be using will be 2 Seagate Cheetah drives (ST173404LCV) 73 GB, at 10K rpm.

I haven't yet picked a SCSI RAID controller but I've found these on ebay:
1) IBM ServeRAID-4L Ultra160 64 Bit SCSI Controller 37L6091
2) IBM ServeRAID SCSI RAID Controller 76H6875 3 Channel
3) Compaq 3200 SCSI Raid Controller 340855-001
4) Adaptec AAA-131U2 Ultra2 PCI SCSI RAID Controller 64MB
5) DELL PERC2/SC AMI MegaRAID 466 SCSI RAID Controller
6) AMI MegaRAID 466 SCSI RAID Rev. B PCI Controller

I'm planning on installing Slackware 10.2 (default scsi.s kernel).

My questions are:
1) Will I be able to take advantage of the speed of the RAID-0 if my home space is on the IDE chain?
2) Does anyone know which of these RAID controllers is easiest to setup/use under linux (preferably under Slackware 10.2) ?


Thanks in advance.

It may actually be faster to have the home on a different drive than the data. "It depends"

I recommend Adaptec products, but am not familiar with that part number.

Yeah I figured it really depends on what you want the system to do.

I thought that if all the data was on the raid I'd see the best system performance (in terms of speed) having the RAID be the /data directory would improve DB queries.

Thanks for the feedback and the suggestion about adaptec!