[buebo]

Hi Folks,
I'm just about to buy me a little Server but I'm a little courios about how fast the Machine has to be. Manly I'm planning to use it as a Fileserver wich means Raidframe in combination with Samba on the Windows-Side and NFS on the Unix-Side. There won't be many clients connectet on a parallel Basis (I have about three Computers on wich I want to be able to mount and use the Files on the Server) and maybe sometimes an FTP-User from the Outside but the Server should be fast enough to handle something like an external FTP-User and myself watching a movie (wich is located on the RAID) at the same Time.
Beside from the Fileserver it should act as a Router (wich should not be too much of a problem) and as a Web and DB Server, but that's only for Development and to have something to play with.
I allready have the HDDs (four 120GB HDD with 7200 rpm) wich I want to use as a RAID-5 but I'm a litte unsure about how strong in Terms of RAM and CPU the Machine should be.
Currently I'm aiming at something in the class of a Celeron or Duron with about 400 to 600 Mhz and 256Mb RAM. Is this enough to handle such a Server and if so, would I run into trouble if I add another Raid-Set later?

Cheers
buebo

[elmore]

seems like the majority of your traffic will be i/o based. Shouldn't need to beefy a box for that. Given you want to use it as a router as well you might want to get a coupleof beefy net cards. Other than that just about anything should do.

The fileserver for my house has a couple of 10000 rpm scsi drives in it with 256 mb of memory. It runs off an old amd 233mhz processor. I stream video music etc. etc. off of it and have never had a problem. make sure you turn softupdates on and I'd suggest looking at vinum for your raid. I believe it's come a long way on OBSD recently.

[buebo]

That sound's nice, so I'll just buy the cheapest ATX-Stuff I come across and be happy 'till the end of my days ;-)
Since I first considered to use FreeBSD as my Fileserver, I had a look on Vinum and it seems really good, but it is also a lot more complicated then Raidframe and I read some stuff from People who had actually Data-Loss because of a missconfigured Vinum, this seems nearly impossible to me when using raidframe since there's not that much configuring at all.
Maybe vinum is more flexible but I have four more or less equal drives and so I don't see any point where I could use this, so would there be any advantages with Vinum?

[elmore]

In the end you should use whatever is the most comfortable to you. My fileserver doesn't run vinum here at the house I use concantenated volumes, but there's definately a data loss issue with that solution. We can help out with whatever you decide. Just let us know. We're happy to help. :)

[frisco]

Since he's planning on using raid5, processor power will matter for writing as each write will require parity calculations. But for the kind of load being mentioned, the lower end celeron should be fine, even after adding another raid set. I'd speculate that a slower pentium might be better for this task due to its larger cache, but have nothing to back that up.

As far as vinum goes, i wouldn't use it on OpenBSD until it becomes in-tree. Last time i checked it out, Ted Unangst had patches for it, but it wasn't actually part of OpenBSD and thus not truly supported/tested.

I've some benchmarks showing the difference between vinum, raidframe and ccd, but my website is down right now (damn routers). To summarize: ccd is by far best for stripes, raidframe and vinum are close calls for mirrors. Unfortunately i wasn't able to play with raid5 for that test as i didn't have the resources.

[cod3fr3ak]

Heh. I am glad someone posted this before me. Well as I said in another thread, I finally trashed my old Win2k server. I just got sick and tired of it dropping connections all the time, or acting fussy if too much data was passed at one time.
So I went out and brought 2 more WD 1200JB(8meg cache), and a Adaptec ATA Raid 1200A 2-Channel raid card found here (http://www.adaptec.com/worldwide/product/proddetail.html?sess=no&language=English+US&prodkey=AAR-1200A&cat=%2fTechnology%2fRAID%2fATA+RAID)
giving me four in all. Enough to do a Raid 0+1 config.
I have a separate 20gb hard running the OS.

The only problem I have had is that OpenBSD software does not recogniz the raid drives are hardware raid at all. No matter which type I tried raid 0, 1 or 0+1; the OS would not newfs the raid volume as one single large volume.

Is there something I am missing? Does OpenBSD support hardware Raid? If not what method is used for running software raid?

[frisco]

Does OpenBSD support hardware Raid?
It depends on your raid card. I don't see your adapter listed at www.opensbd.org/i386.html

If not what method is used for running software raid?
RAIDframe. Read raidctl(8) for more info.