From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-Id: <200303310537.h2V5btv26894@augusta.math.psu.edu> To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] SCSI or IDE? In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 31 Mar 2003 10:52:38 +0900." From: Dan Cross Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2003 00:37:55 -0500 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 876ec660-eacb-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 > I'm now considering to build a new venti + fossil file server. > I can choose both of SCSI and IDE HDDs, because I have to > buy one anyway. > > Which one do you recommend? > Does the IDE driver use faster one, oh well, I forgot the name > Ultra DMA? I'm wondering myself. Three weeks ago, I said I was going to build a file server and asked whether I should go with Fossil+Venti or the standalone server. Unfortunately, I got side tracked and haven't built anything. If I were going to build a standalone file server, I would put a cached pseudo-worm, with the cache on a set of four 9GB SCSI disks that I have sitting in another room, with another 9GB disk for other (all hanging off of an LSI logic SCSI controller [which, btw, can be ordered from the LSI Logic web site]) and the pseudo-worm on a pair of mirrored 120GB IDE drives (with the kernel and 9load on an IDE flash device). I'd probably put on a gig or so of RAM and let the kernel use that for buffers. With fossil, I'm just not sure yet how to configure things, and I have little room for experimentation right now, so some guidance would be most welcome. I'd like something that performs as well as the standalone file server (particular for reading, which is what I'm going to be doing a lot more than writing), but seems kind of weird using all those disks for a large write cache (though if a read cache is in the works, it might make sense to put them all on the machine in anticipation of that). What's the advice on such things? Also, I have an older file server that's running the standalone code that I'd like to convert into an archive for my Unix junk. What's the best way to convert an old, standalone fileserver into a fossil server (ie, preserving the dump)? In particular, I want to replace the drives in the old machine with something bigger that's mirrored. Fossil for this is ideal because I can run an NFS server off of the machine in addition to fossil/venti. Maybe I could put MP3's on it, too. However, it strikes me that a lot of this is quite literally, read-only access. Does fossil make sense in those environments? Or would I be better off with a standalone FS+CPU server combination? - Dan C.