Advice needed on HD setup

Doddsy

New member
Ok I'm in need of a little advice. I just got a little system off a friend that he was throwing out to use as a linux experiment box/case modding experiment. I was thinking about turning it into a little media/file server and was wanting some advice on it. It's an 1700xp system, nforce2, onboard gfx etc. I'm going to use the 80gig hard drive I got with it as a boot drive. There are a few options I was thinking about:

1. Buy a cheap sata raid card (primarily because I prefer sata drives to e-ide, and they're cheaper) then later on get a few drives for it. I was looking at the awful, cheap ones on ebay, not sure if they'd just cause problems? Also looking at the revo64 by xfx, gets decent reviews and is cheap.

2. Buy an internal hotswap caddy for the 5.25 bays, not sure how this connects the the mobo, would I then need a sata interface card anyway?

3. Any other ideas? The mobo has 3 or 4 pci slots, a couple of eide slots, agp slot. Not much else.
 
if you want decent performance out of it, use internal sata or sata II pci card with 4 channels each. I believe they run about $50 new. You'll get a max speed of 66MB a sec through the pci bus but that should be plenty for most applications. You could put two or three of those in there and create multiple raid 0,1 or 5 arrays. As long as you don't access more than one array at a time you'll be fine.

If it's just a fileserver, I highly recommend you get a distro of openfiler. It's a custom linux distribution I really love and it's pretty simple to set up and works better than a lot of dedicated nas's out there. It also blew away my tweaked fedora core 6 install and has way more features.
 
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