[itdiscuss] Building A Linux Rackmount Fileserver

[Bill Glick]

I have been a huge Seagate fan over the past few years. But, I was
told that all new Seagate drives now have a maximum warranty of 3
years. Seagate supposedly just changed their warranty on Jan 1, 2009,
but I haven't verified the details on this.

Also, Seagate has had some significant drive failures in the past
couple of months.  Check this out:
http://www.tuaw.com/2009/01/19/tick-tick-tick-significant-number-of-seagate-hard-drives-fail/

I maintain about 30 linux rackmount servers. I prefer to purchase
systems from Penguin Computing or Dell, but have a few generic systems
that we've had built. One of my biggest complaints with the generic
systems is tracking down a failed drive under software/kernel raid. I
had such a system with a drive failure over the holidays. It had a
spare drive setup in the raid, so it recovered nicely. But, I have no
easy way now of identifying the failed drive. There are no LEDs on the
drives or drive caddies to show me which drive is inactive. And
historically I've found very little predictable logic in how linux
decides to identify it's drives.

Most of our current linux file servers are in a 2U case, with 6 1TB
Seagate drive behind an Adaptec 3405 RAID controller, 16GB of memory,
and dual 2.66GHz quad core Xeons.

--
Bill Glick
  bill at glick.com
  http://blog.billglick.com/



On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 7:10 AM, Jeffrey Thompson <jthompsonic at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm interested in building an Ubuntu  Linux rackmount fileserver.
> With the combination of multiple forms of RAID supported in Ubuntu
> v8.10 (fast RAID software in the kernel and RAID builtin to the
> motherboards to support eight 1.5 TeraByte drives) and $100 TeraByte
> drives, and the quad-core Xeon and Opteron cpus under $200, I believe
> I can build a respectible server for cheap.
>
> The design goal is best value.  Most processor speed, memory,
> redundant hard drive space possible for the money.
>
> Question #1: What rackmount components do you like for a rackmount
> fileserver?  Including the following:
>
> • Case: I'm going for a 2U case
> • Power supply (pref. redundant)
> • motherboard
> • CPU
> • memory
> • hard drive
>
> So far I like the SATA II Seagate 1 TB drive with a five year warrenty.
>
> Question #2: Where do you like to buy your components?
>
> Sent from my iPhone
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