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RAMdisk RAID?
drew_92123 asks: "I've got a friend who does a LOT of video editing but is on a limited budget. He is currently using a raid array and while quite large, it's not as fast as he had hoped. I had an idea and wanted to know if there is a way to make it a reality, so of course I though of all the brilliant minds here. I have about a dozen Pentium II computers with 1GB of RAM. I would like to upgrade them to 2GB and throw in some gigabit NICs and create a 1.9GB RAMdisk on each one. Then I want to use one of the computers to RAID the RAMdisks together to be shared via Samba most likely. They are all 1U systems, with no HDD's, just a 64MB IDE flash disk. Any ideas out there?" Has anyone successfully put together such a system? How well did it work for you and are there any caveats that you would like to share with others who would do the same?
he needs the RAID part when one of these machines crashes.
I hate to be frank, but your solution is equal parts ambitious, elaborate, expensive, unreliable, slow, kludgey, and stupid, with an extra helping of stupid.
Buy a single SCSI RAID card with three channels, three 36GB U160 drives (10 or 15K, doesn't really matter), and set up a hardware RAID 0 stripe. You'll save money and be able to edit any amount of video you want. Hell, buy a SINGLE 72 gig 10K drive and a high-quality single-channel SCSI controller. You'll save even more money.
This is the best way to do this. You've at least proven there's at least one other way to do it.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Maybe thats the point. If he runs a porn site he could wipe all the evidence by hitting a kill switch but with RAID and UPS he is protected from accidental data loss. He could also rig a software deadman switch which shuts down the systems unless it receives a signal every so often.