On Tue, Dec 9, 2008 at 1:04 PM, John Drescher <drescherjm AT gmail DOT com> wrote:
  

So what do you think a reasonable cpu for bacula would be?

      

Depends on what level of performance you are looking for. My director
is a 2 processor 2GHz opteron machine (circa 2003) with 4 GB of memory
and 18 or so  x 250 GB SATA 1 drives in raid 6. My main storage daemon
is on a second machine with the same cpus and ram but only 5 x 250 GB
SATA drives and the storage is a 2 drive x 24 slot LTO 2 autochanger.
Right now the bacula database is on that machine but it has been on
yet another machine. On top of that a typical SATA fileserver will be
a desktop class 2.5GHz Athlon X2  with 4 or 8GB of memory and 5 to 10
750 GB Segate SATA2 drives in raid 6 using mostly the motherboard sata
ports. This type of machine will net 300MB/s writes and even higher
reads in xfs. At 300 MB/s writes the cpu usage never goes above 7% for
the raid under normal conditions. Replacing a drive will make it go to
around 20% of 1 cpu until the drive is re synced.

    

I would go with software raid, no need to spend extra money unless you
already have one, then go ahead.

See/compare some performance statistics and functionality like swap drives:
http://lucasmanual.com/mywiki/Bacula#head-3ad60a172345da090bfbaa9488f8f9e6b88722b8

Also if you are going with hardware raid will you be using SAS which
supports (SAS + SATA connectors) or just SATA?

I'm not sure about ubuntu, but if you are installing debian you can
setup raid right there, during installation. It was fairly easy. After
that bacula setup and you are ready to go.
It would seem to me anything over 2004 pentium 4 should be enough. The
biggest question is: does the pc you want to purchase has enough space
to fit let say 4 hdd and does the motherboard supports these many hard
drives connectors.

Do people have recommendation on that? I actually would like to add a
5th 500gb drive to my raid but I have no space for it.

Thanks,
Lucas