[Asterisk-Users] Motherboard and processor recommendations

[Konrads Smelkovs]

On linux raid:

Linux raid supports hot swapping well. It doesn't care about the
hardware, which is being swapped, much. Obviously, in simple disk
scenario, which is used fot sw raid, only scsi and SATA can be
hot-swapped. Also, make sure that the motherboard supports hot-swap
SATA, i've seen some that have stickers that they don't, i can only
guess how many don't put the stickers when they should.

Also, linux raid performance is very good. HW raid gains perfromance
boost because of extra cache they have onboard, thus peak writes are
easily swallowed by cache and written when possible.

As an end note, don't try to boot your linux raid with one or more
hard drives missing, it will fail. If you remove the disk, make sure
you put something back AND make sure you have the same partitions
there.

> SATA is fast enough. In fact, ATAPI is also fast enough in most
> scenarios. It is just that SCSI disks/arrays tend to be of better
> quality (but usually much more expensive).
> 
> IIRC Linux's raid support will support hot-swapping disks, but I'm not
> sure which disks are are supported.
> 
> An external array with its own CPU doesn't necessarily mean better
> performance than one using the host CPU, BTW. Though it will take some
> load off of Asterisk.
> 
> And if this is just about redundnacy and not about performance, consider
> not buying an expensive array at all, and using two cheap systems. The
> cost will be roughly the same, I believe. (RAID= "Redundant Array of
> Inexpensive Disks"). Any simple way to achive redundancy here?

-- 
Konrads Smelkovs
Applied IT sorcery.