Re: Storage (8*IDE HDs) any experiences?
On Thu, Apr 26, 2001 at 01:39:01PM -0500, Dimitri Maziuk wrote:
> Hi all
>
> I notice there are these new-fangled motherboards with 2*ATA-100 and
> 2*ATA-33 ports. With 75GB disks, that baby should give us 600GB of raw
> disk space (8 drives) at around $2K US. Sounds attractive, considering
> that el-cheapo RAID boxes of similar capacity are around $10K.
>
> Anyone runs [Debian] Linux on an 8-drive box like that? Is that
> supported at all? Any gotchas I should know about? The mobo I'm looking
> at is ABIT BH6-II.
Be warned of the issues with having two hard drives per IDE channel. I know
that there were reports of massive corruption when using DMA with specific
models of WDC and Maxtor drives on the same channel in DMA mode. You'll also
face some pretty serious performance slowdowns when accessing both drives at
the same time, since most IDE drives cannot do disconnect/reconnect like SCSI
drives can. The best way would be to have one IRQ used for each IDE drive,
which is pretty tough to do on an x86 system. Hopefully your BIOS can allow
this sort of setup, since IRQ sharing still causes a bit of a performance hit.
--
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