Large hdds

[RECOiL™]

Hey,

I need to get some large storage long life hdds for my linux server. I was thinking of 400gb ide drives...

Any recommendations?

[jimbouk]

If you want long life then you'll need to go professional which normally means less space (and more cost). If so take a look here for a roundup of current drives.

Otherwise a simple raid and some standard hard-drives would be best. If the data is that valuable, buy 3 identical drives, mirror 2 and keep one as a spare for when one dies.

Are you limited to IDE? SATA is becoming the standard these days and there's a lot more/easier/cheaper SATA raid solutions. As for recomendations then I'd say either Samsung or Seagate from personal experience. Been the most reliable drives for me so far.

[Biscuit]

Becoming standard? IMO its safe to say that IDE is outdated now and SATA is standard.

Best bang for buck at the moment is 320gig. Personally im a western digital man but experiences with seagate and samsung have also been very good.

[mishima]

Samsung Spinpoints for performance and least amount of noise. The Seagate's offer the best warranty though. Samsung offer 3 years and Seagate offer 5 years warranty. With there not being much in it with the performance increase I would go for the Seagates for reliablility.

[RECOiL™]

Well its for my linux bos you see.. and truth be told, i havent dabbled setting up sata drives on it before, plus its debian 3.1 so im not sure what the sata support is like.

all 4 ide channels are used up. Ideally i want to increase the storage space without having to repartion and fluff around.

I use the box as a glftpd server... sigh... i wish i went with LVM now, cus then i could just chuck in some new drives and not have to reconfig glftpd.

[Skinleech]

I have a Seagate 500gb SATA and 750GB PATA drive in my HTPC, both run like a charm. And a 120gb for the OS and random bits.

So my vote goes to them!

I even have a 5 year old 80gb seagate going strong.

[aidanjt]

Well its for my linux bos you see.. and truth be told, i havent dabbled setting up sata drives on it before, plus its debian 3.1 so im not sure what the sata support is like.

all 4 ide channels are used up. Ideally i want to increase the storage space without having to repartion and fluff around.

I use the box as a glftpd server... sigh... i wish i went with LVM now, cus then i could just chuck in some new drives and not have to reconfig glftpd.

Just update your kernel, plus Debian 4.0 was released a few days ago which includes Linux 2.6.18, which has excellent support for SATA chips, so, just get a cheapass 4 port SATA controller, setup the new array on that, and copy your stuff over, you could use another box to ease the transtition

[RECOiL™]

Yeah i have downloaded the latest debian dvds. My problem is this, how to go about the whole transition. I need to plan this carefully as I dont want o f*ck it up.

Should I consider using raid ?

Ideally I would like to have lvm setup, but how to go about setting up lvm when you have none matching hdds that already contain data.

*gah*

[aidanjt]

I've tried LVM on top of mdraid in the past, it gave me nothing but headaches and the filesystems kept crapping themselves.

If you can afford a real hardware SATA RAID controller do it, then all you need is LVM by itself and a flexible fielsystem and you'd be sorted.

Another point, EVMS is a lot easier to work with than all the commandline userspace volume management tools, something you might be interested with playing around on

[IntaCepta]

I haven't heard much of the samsungs spinpoints causing any troubles. I do like the 320Gb version myself