# Squid Setup... Hardware questions



## belikeyeshua (Nov 24, 2009)

I've got a couple more questions.

I decided to post some ads on Freecycle and it looks like I'm going to be able to get almost everything that I need for free! One guy has a bunch of older, small scsi hard drives and a bunch of PCI cards, HD ribbons, and other computer parts as well as an old (500Mhz) Server and a large empty case. Another guy has a motherboard and a couple computers complete with memory & hard drives, and he has another hard drive and some other computer parts. 

And then I bought a PCI WIFI card that is rated at 300MB/sec and has three antennas, on eBay. It looks like its one of the best.

Now, I'm wondering, if I have the space, should I just put in several or more hard drives and configure squid to use all of them? Or is that pointless if half of them are scsi, the other half IDE, most of them run at 7,200 RPMs, and a lot of them are 60GB each?

Or, say if I go ahead and buy some 15K SCSI hard drives, it looks like I can get a set of three ranging from 16-36GB capacity for about $30 with shipping. So, if I had three 15k hard drives, would I benefit from also using other SCSI or IDE hard drives (as many as I can fit in the case)? Or does the extra somewhat slower hard drives slow squid down instead of increase speeds?

Thanks a lot,


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## vivek (Nov 24, 2009)

Faster hard drive == faster speed. So if I were you, I will go with scsi hard drives with software RAID. I'm not sure how big is your network, but lots of RAM also provides good caching speed for LAN.


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