Newsgroup: it.comp.hardware.overclock
Titolo: Need help and advice with complex Dual RAID (SCSI/IDE) System

Greetings all!
 
I've been a lurker on USENET for a couple of years now (or close) and
I value the opinion of a great many that post here. I'm getting ready
to rape and pillage my system and do a serious upgrade. The first
flame I'm going to get if is people are going to tell me to wait for
Northwood - don't. I'm a Microsoft OEM and am a partner in a local
computer consulting company so when the Northwood comes out, and drops
in price, it'l get rip out the P4T and 1.8 and sell it to a client as
a demo model.
 
Here are the proposed specs of the new monster:
 
Asus P4T Motherboard
512 Meg Kingston PC800 RDRAM
Intel P4 1.8 ghz Retail
Enermax EG651P-VE 650 Watt Power Supply
Existing Supermicro 750 Server Case
Gainward Geforce 3 Golden Sample Powerpack Vivo
SB Live v5.1 OEM
Adaptec 39160 U160 Dual Channel SCSI Adadpter (Already own it)
4 Seagate ST318436LW U160 SCSI HD (I've already got two - running off
of channel A of 39160)
Plextor UltraPlex Wide (Own it and running it off of channel B of the
39160)
Plextor 24/10/40 (Own it and running off of Primary Master)
3Com 3c-905-TX 10/100 Nic (Already got it)
DirecPC Satellite PCI Modem (Already got it)
Mylex ACCELERAID 170 U160 SCSI RAID 32MB 
Microsoft Windows XP Final as and OS (As an OEM I have mine already)
 
I realize I may have to sacrifice my NIC as the P4T only supports 5
PCI slots. I only use it once a month when I bring my laptop home from
work to transfer filles. It would be just as easy to buy a USB based
NIC to do those small transfers and burn everything large at work on
CD to bring home (which is what I do most of time now anyway).
 
My initial thought was to stripe the 4 Seagates and utilize that as my
boot and data drive. I need the speed for two reasons: 1: I'm an
impatient bastard and 2: I produce music and my system bogs down when
I've got 60 or seventy samples running at the same time. Games scream
off of those drives too. I also dabble in video owrk and the faster
the drive the less time I have to wait for conversions, encodes and
decodes.
 
Then I realized I really need a backup system fot the 50+ growing gig
of audio and video work I've done (not to mention the enevitable MP3
collection). Right now I boot off of my SCSI drives and use a 60 gig
75GXP (selling it) for storage and "backup" but I know if that drives
fails I'm pooched. I need a hgih speed backup option and am unwilling
to spend the money on a DLT - plus I'd like to store my Outlook,
Quicken, Favorites, and other such data on a drive that has redundancy
and I don't want to slow down the 4 drives by putting the overhead of
RAID 5 on it If it's my boot drive and audio and video processing
platform. My solution was to purchase 4 7200rpm Seagate Barracuda
ST380021a 80 Gig drives and an ATA100 based (Adaptec 2400A) RAID board
setup with RAID 5 for redundancy. Veritas Backup v8.6 was then my
choice to backup disk to disk.
 
After reviewing the prices on equipment I started to have some doubts
as to whether or not I was making the right decision. For the price of
the Barracudas and 2400A I could buy a couple of Seagate ST336752LW
15k rpm drives for a couple of hundred dollars less. My question
(after all this [grin]) is can I hook those up to the Mylex and run
them in RAID 0 and take the remaining 4 18 gig Seagate drives and run
them in RAID 5 for redundancy. Antoher question is has anybody had any
luck in using Ghost Enterprise v7.0 to make images from a Mylex board?
 
Abviously performance is a major factor to me, but losing data,
reliability, and compatibility are also major concerns. I use all
manner of audio software, and like to play a game here and there, and
want to make sure I'm designing a system that will give me the best of
all worlds. Money isn't (much) of a concern because I'm a dealer and
can get the equipment at cost so I'm really interested in the best
possible solution as long as reliability, performance, and redundancy
are taken care of.
 
I've built hundreds of servers but have never tried to do what I'm now
thinking about attempting. Anyone running IDE and SCSI RAID in the
same system? Overall I think I'm most interested in using the 15k
drives if I can run them in RAID 0 on the same card I'm running RAID 5
with my 18 gig drives. I'm pretty sure this can be done, but have
never tried it. Admittedly I'm going to end up buying another 18 gig
drive soon for storage as I'm already close the the 57 gig or so I'll
get running the 4 18's in RAID five. If I went that route I may just
buy the extra drive up front.
 
I see pros and cons both ways - introducing a second RAID adapter
would allow me more flexibility with transfer speeds between the two
logical drives which would be nice. Overall, what method is going to
give me the fastest boot time and allow me to utilitze the most tracks
of samples in my audio work? Anyone want to venture an opinion?
 
You guys always seem to like a challange. Here's a good one for you
because without benchmarks I can't make the decision and aIslo can't
make on eo ntheory alone. Perhaps you guys can. Let's see one of those
80 posts thread with everyone's opinions - any real world experience
would also be helpful! Anybody that has any advice or can help me out
I would be most appreciative and be glad to post benchmarks on the
system once it's built. I cross posted in several places so if you
could email me and let me know you'e replied I'll be sure to check the
answer.  Thanks in advance for your help!
 
GoldNKid

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