itspudding.com

…is goddamn awesome.

Here’s why. I’ve been running a system the last few months which has consisted of 5×80gb drives I had lying around (one for the OS, the other four in a software RAID 5 setup) plus a few other single drives. It was a P4 3.0GHz Prescott running on an Intel 865 chipset, which, although acceptable, struggled a little under full load. Especially considering the board doesn’t support PCI-E and only has 2 SATA ports and 100mbit ethernet onboard.

So I ponied up this week for an Athlon 64 3000+ processor from eBay this week. $90 later, and I’ve thrown it in a spare Gigabyte K8NF9 board, which had double the SATA ports and onboard gigabit ethernet. This turned out to be just a little zippier than the P4 setup. Since I run Gentoo Linux, everything was set up to compile for a P3 architecture (P4 is bugged, so I didn’t use it). It’d probably work on an Athlon 64, but I’d rather have everything done properly, which either meant recompiling the whole system for a K8 processor, or reinstalling Linux. I decided on the latter, and threw the 64-bit version on anyway.

Now this is the first software RAID setup I’ve used before, and it was working well up until this point. I wasn’t sure how it’d handle a reinstall of Linux though, I was expecting the worst (having to let mdadm rebuild it). I was pleasantly surprised though, after sorting out my bugged GRUB config, to find that after compiling the RAID drivers into the kernel, it automatically detected the array and all the drives in it. It definitely wasn’t that easy with my last hardware RAID controller (admittedly, it was a Promise card).

Then came adding another 80gb drive to the array. A bit of Googling found this excellent howto on adding a spare drive to a software RAID 5 setup, extending it to the spare drive, and extending the filesystem to fit. About 2 hours later, it was all done. Couldn’t be easier.

And although I haven’t got a gigabit network card on the other end to test the speeds, it all seems pretty damn quick. Should give me enough storage to last till I can afford a trio of 500gb drives, which seem to be rapidly dropping in price.

Here’s how it looks:
Filesystem Type Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2 ext3 72G 2.3G 66G 4% /
/dev/sda1 ext2 16M 3.4M 12M 24% /boot
/dev/md/1 ext3 294G 182G 101G 65% /mnt/store01
/dev/sdc1 ext3 230G 158G 60G 73% /mnt/store02
/dev/sdd1 ext3 147G 100G 41G 72% /mnt/store03

And here’s the tower of doom!

(Trusty old AthlonXP 1700+ IPCop firewall on the bottom, the fileserver on top)