Server Design & Setup

There was an interesting question posed on Slashdot today, about internal hard drives and storage. This one simple question poses a plethora of other questions, mainly about the best way to retain data and access it in an efficient manor.

Before I give an answer, I should first disclose my own setup. In my server (Dual 800MHz P3 w/ 3GB RAM), I have five drives installed: one 40GB, two 500GB, and two 1TB's. The 40GB drive is currently the system drive, which does little more than temporary storage and system/home folders.

The two 500GB drives are setup as a RAID1 set, which means the drives mirror each other. Because the PCI SATA controller I purchased was only $40, the card itself does not do hardware RAID (where the mirroring would be done by the PCI card), but a software RAID through drivers. Since I have no real need for a fancy setup or super-fast throughput on this array, software RAID does just fine (I even checked it as I was writing this).

The two 1TB drives are setup as an LVM. What this means is that I can take as many drives as I want, put them in a single machine, and the computer will only see one drive. Cool, huh? Well, there's another little piece to it... not only will the computer see only one drive, but I can expand or contract that "drive" as many times as I want, adding or subtracting disks! So I have a theoretical infinite amount of space!