[NTLUG:Discuss] Software RAID NAS Box

[Daniel Hauck]

Okay, a little background:

I've got this old box from the office... a server with a failed drive 
that is way out of warranty and will not be used by the business for 
anything.  So what do I do with this?  New toy!

This box is an iomega NAS box.  It came with Windows 2000 installed and 
4 123GB drives where a small amount of each partition was set up for the 
OS and the rest of the HD space was configured as a software RAID5. 
Fairly simple.  The hardware is a relatively simple system board with 
on-board video, 512MB RAM, floppy controller, two IDE ports and all 
that.  The system board also has a HighPoint IDE RAID controller which 
is really just another software RAID which means two more IDE 
controllers with the expectation that software RAID drivers will be used 
on them... so yeah, 4 IDE ports.  This device also has some strange 
little device to interface the IDE ports to these removable drive trays. 
  (Interestingly, it interferes with trying to attach IDE devices 
addressed as "slave" somehow...)  Finally, there's two 10/100 ethernet 
ports and a PCI slot with a riser and an Adaptec SCSI RAID card. (not in 
use)

So I want to do this under Linux (of course) and I bought 4 400GB drives 
from outpost.com.  (They're pretty cheap... )  I'm going to install 
CentOS on the box with the intent of using it as a means of serving up 
FTP, SMB and NFS services.  I'm giving some thought to how I might set 
up the partitioning and all that.  Initially, I'm just thinking of 
mimicking the previous scheme when it was running under Win2K.  In this 
case, each drive will have the same partition scheme:

100MB /boot,
2GB {swap},
4000MB /
*everything else* /data

The non-swap partitions should be RAID where /data would be a RAID5 and 
the other two RAID1.  CentOS didn't issue any complaints when I wanted 
to set everything up as RAID and then set the actual /boot, / and /data 
partitions up in the Linux software RAID.  I think the installation 
failed while files were copying because of a bad install DVD... (I'll 
check it in a bit and burn another one if needed)

Okay, so I'm soliciting comments and better ideas..?