Slimserver with RAID and more than 1 drive letter

[montechristo]

Guys

I'm running XP on my media server box, I recently bought a couple of 300GB SATA drives with the intention of running them as a hardware RAID Mirror set.

However I don't think 300GB will be sufficient when my collection is reripped to FLAC in the near future.

however I also beleive slimserver can only address one drive letter?

If I understand that correctly any idea how I can go higher (obviously could buy bigger disks, but that aside)

e.g if I had 4 x 300GB SATA drives

I could make 2 into a windows set to get 600GB under one drive letter, but can I still do this if running hardware raid?

thoughts appreciated.

Mark.

[bishopdonmiguel]

> however I also beleive slimserver can only address one drive letter?

You can address multiple storage locations using Windows Shortcuts. You should make sure you don't do anything to cause a circular loop. Although not foolproof, the best way to handle this is to create a new directory that includes only shortcuts to your media. Point SlimServer at this directory (make sure this directory is not a child of any shortcut).

[mherger]

> however I also beleive slimserver can only address one drive letter?

Put a shortcut to the second drive in the first one.

> If I understand that correctly any idea how I can go higher (obviously
> could buy bigger disks, but that aside)
>
> e.g if I had 4 x 300GB SATA drives

If you have 4 disks, why don't you set up RAID5 resulting in one disk of
900GB?

> I could make 2 into a windows set to get 600GB under one drive letter,
> but can I still do this if running hardware raid?

What is "this"? Your raid controller has to support the raid level. If it
supports levels 1/0 only, you'll be limited to 600MB.

--

Michael

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[bishopdonmiguel]

> I could make 2 into a windows set to get 600GB under one drive letter, but can I still do this if running hardware raid?

A good solution would be RAID-5. As I recall, you need at least 3 discs at the expense of 1 disc. So 3-300GB discs get you 600GB, 4-300GB discs get you 900GB, etc. Plus you get data redundancy, if any drive fails, replace it and once it rebuilds, so you've lost nothing. Unfortunately, I don't think XP supports anything but RAID-0 and RAID-1.

I would not create a windows set (dynamic disc set). If you lose any single drive all of your data is lost. Go with separate basic discs and make sure you backup to spare drives consistently. Get a removable drive tray and GHOST and create images for recovery.

[nobspangle]

I could make 2 into a windows set to get 600GB under one drive letter, but can I still do this if running hardware raid?

If you have 4 disks you could run 2 RAID 1 arrays, then use windows to combine them as a dynamic disk, this solves the problem bishopdonmiguel mentioned above, because each disk in the set has a redundant pair.

The best option is RAID 5 but this is only available on Windows Server or with expensive hardware cards.

If your machine is a dedicated music server, consider running linux which will handle RAID 5 out of the box.

[notanatheist]

If your machine is a dedicated music server, consider running linux which will handle RAID 5 out of the box.

Not quite. That depends upon your controller. A true hardware controller like 3Ware would work with nearly every distro of linux "out of the box" but onboard controllers or cheap PCI solutions would be an absolute PITA to set up.

As for how to handle the drives, don't do shortcuts. If you're doing Windows then you can mount the drive as a folder on an existing drive. It all happens under Disk Management. Same goes for linux. Any drive can be mounted within a directory of another drive thus adding more space with ease.

[Robin Bowes]

notanatheist said the following on 09/01/2006 07:37:
> nobspangle Wrote:
>
>>If your machine is a dedicated music server, consider running linux
>>which will handle RAID 5 out of the box.
>
>
> Not quite. That depends upon your controller. A true hardware
> controller like 3Ware would work with nearly every distro of linux "out
> of the box" but onboard controllers or cheap PCI solutions would be an
> absolute PITA to set up.

Actually, linux can do software RAID5 out of the box with any supported
IDE or SATA controller.

You can't easily install the root filesystem onto a software RAID5
partition, but that's about the only significant limitation.

Most modern distros will even handle seting up the RAID devices as part
of the installation process, e.g. Fedora Core 4.

R.
--
http://robinbowes.com

If a man speaks in a forest,
and his wife's not there,
is he still wrong?

[notanatheist]

notanatheist said the following on 09/01/2006

Actually, linux can do software RAID5 out of the box with any supported
IDE or SATA controller.

You can't easily install the root filesystem onto a software RAID5
partition, but that's about the only significant limitation.

That was the point. One: "supported controller", two: install on root filesystem.

With a 3Ware or other true hardware controller you can install without any issues. With SoftRAID you have the above limitations.