The Time Has Come

Fedex is currently ushering the constituent elements of my new Linux RAID to my front door. I’m hoping beyond hope to have them today, but I fear it’s a vain hope. Newegg.com has supplied my case, video card, MLB and processor, and I’m bringing the rest of the goodies to the party. Here’s the nitty gritty:

LinkWorld El-cheapo Case Gigabyle GA-7N400 Pro2 Athlon XP 2500+ Radeon 9200 SE

Some of you may believe that this rig is a little over spec’ed for a simple RAID box. This may be true, but in order to have a bus fast enough to not choke back gigabit, I needed at least a 266 bus, and the Gigabyte board had both firewire and gigabit ethernet on board, saving me about $50 in PCI cards. For these 4 items I spent a little under $300. Had I gone with a slower MLB, and processor, I could have saved about $70, and then would have had to buy a gig-e card and firewire. I’d rather pay a bit more, and have some breathing room should I want to use the machine as a desktop later.

Yes the case is cheap, and it will probably cut the shit out of me putting the thing together, but it’s got 6 HD bays and a 400W power supply. It will do the job without too much fuss and has front firewire and USB slots. And it’s not painfully ugly.

The video card is overkill, but it was the cheapest video card with DVI (I don’t own any VGA monitors) that was reasonable. i.e. the $10 difference between the 32mb version and the 128mb version makes it reasonable.

I’m currently thinking about using Fedora for my linux distro. I’m fearing having to recompile the kernel to include the onboard gigabit and firewire, but I guess we shall see soon enough whether or not Fedora ships with the drivers built in. Anyone have any better suggestions for a distro?

There are 5 250gb drives waiting to live in a new RAID 5 home. Soon this home will be built.