linux file server mobo

cmartin0

cmartin0

New Member
I need to make a basic file server. I want to run RAID on it to prevent data lost from hard drive failure. I am not to familiar RAID but could a good on board RAID with linux RAID software work fine?

I want to go intel on this server. I need a full system but I guess its best to start with the motherboard/CPU first. The server is for home use and the price range is about $500.

The main issue is finding a good motherboard that Debian stable can take full feature of, particularly the raid controller.
 
I think you can run RAID via software function rather than hardware function - with Linux Ubuntu. I haven't tried it - but I remember reading about it when I was searching through Linux documention a while back.
 
Why do you want to run RAID? It really isn't a end user technology. Raid0 is not stable enough, RAID1 causes disk I/O bottle necks, and RAID 5 is pretty expensive.

What exactly are you trying to accomplish here?
 
cmartin0 said:
IIRC i have seen motherboards with RAID 5 built in. I am not sure how that can be configured through Linux
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OK that doesn't answer the question I asked. What is your higher goal? Just trying to mitigate chances of data loss?
 
if you get a board with a south bridge that supports raid 5 it doesn't really matter if the *nix distribution supports it. You configure your raid in your bios. The disks that you configured will be presented to the os as one physical disk. Raid software you install within your os are usually only used for monitoring the raid set(s). You can also configure them but only if your os is on a separate disk.

Note: for home use i wouldn't use raid. I'd just backup all your important data on a regular basis. Most os have simple backup systems that are more than sufficient for these tasks.
 
Vipernitrox said:
Note: for home use i wouldn't use raid. I'd just backup all your important data on a regular basis. Most os have simple backup systems that are more than sufficient for these tasks.
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tlarkin said:
That doesn't prevent dataloss that prevents down time. Back up solutions prevent dataloss. RAID != data loss prevention.
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Well, what is data backup then? Do data backup system not use RAID? Burning DVD's not practical for the amount of data that I have. I don't want to use a cloud storage service.
 
Vipernitrox said:
how many gigs (or terabytes) of data do you want backupped? And on what are they stored?
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As of now about 5gb on one laptop and one desktop. Another desktop will be added with in two months. Baby comes in January; the amount of data to be stored will increase there after. Also if I am making a RAID file server I might as well throw video on there for streaming. Or is that bad?
 
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i'd just get an external hdd with network support. Or a nas with 2 disks in raid 1 if you want raid security. And run backup tasks on each computer.
and streaming to where?
 
cmartin0 said:
Well, what is data backup then? Do data backup system not use RAID? Burning DVD's not practical for the amount of data that I have. I don't want to use a cloud storage service.
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External hard drives, other network drives, optical tape drives, etc. RAID is for redundancy, not for backing up data. RAID 5 will allow a drive to fail and rebuild upon it's replacement and the machine will still run so you have zero down time (ie, it is redundant), however if more than 1 drives fails or you have a complete system failure your data is toast.

Back ups should be done on other systems or other drives that are not part of that system you are backing up.
 
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