On Wed, Aug 21, 2002 at 03:42:57PM -0400, Steve Bellovin wrote:
> So -- should I use two drives, each on one of the two IDE channels on 
> the motherboard?

That would be the fastest way, but I have two disks hanging off the same
IDE channel and it's working pretty well even still.

> The CD drive would be very lightly used, except for 
> NetBSD installations and upgrades.  Buy an outboard IDE controller?

I have a "RAID" motherboard with four IDE channels, so the CD drive
is on a separate channel (I have four hard disks and a CD-ROM on the
RAID box).

> (SCSI, apart from being unneeded, is well beyond my budget for this 
> project.)  Would I be better off with a small system disk, plus two 
> RAID drives for data?

I installed the system on the RAID and have a small non-RAID partition
for kernel.  (I'm not sure if this is still needed.)

> Which RAID should I use?  Is RAID1 sufficient, or should I use 4 or 5?  
> (The goal is reliability, not speed.)

I'm using RAID1, have suffered a disk failure (thanks, IBM!), but lost no
data.  RAID5 needs more disks, AFAIK.

> How much CPU do I need?  Would a 233 Mhz Pentium or a 350 Mhz P II 
> suffice?  (I'll almost certainly use one of the Intel NIC cards.)  And 
> any suggestions on motherboards?

My box is a 900 MHz Athlon, but the CPU is mostly idling, so I guess
you can use a slower machine without problems.  Just get decent drives -
the IBM's I had were fast, the Samsung that replaced the dead IBM is
_much_ slower.

I'm thinking of getting those new WDC drives (120 GB, 7200 rpm, 8 MB
cache) and building a new RAID1 server.  I wonder if those drives are
reliable or not..

  -jm