Re: Ye Olde optimization/mirror disk space debate
On Fri, 2002-11-22 at 17:07, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote:
> Matt Zimmerman <mdz@debian.org> writes:
>
> > Say I have 6 36GB disks which cost me $100 apiece (USD600 / 216GB USD2.78
> > per gigabyte). Naturally, I put them in a RAID-5 array, for 180GB usable
> > space. Now we're at $3.33/GB, not counting filesystem overhead. This is a
> > realistic server configuration, not the pricewatch.com 180GB special for
> > storing Vorbis streams at home.
> >
> > "Just drop in a cheap IDE disk" is not a realistic solution for this
> > application.
>
> 36GB disks? Why buy 36GB disks when you can buy big ones? See, the
> problem here is that things are in such frequent motion, that what
> seemed like a big disk once is now small. 36GB is a tiny disk.
36GB is not so tiny if you think at people who already have a
raid arry with this kind of disks. And it's fair for a current
SCSI drive.
> There are plenty of options. My claim is threefold.
>
> 1) The relevant number is how much it costs *us*, provided we do the
> right thing, and make it simple for mirrors to mirror only what
> they wish;
>
> 2) Complaining about "hundreds of megabytes" is complaining about
> trivialities. (I do not dispute that 60GB is worth thinking
> about.)
>
> 3) This discussion requires thinking about actual cost, and not a
> vague idea of how it must not be useful and would be "too
> expensive". We should think what the cost to us actually is, and
> then decide if that's too expensive.
Do you sometime think at other people's bilities ?
I'm sure big mirrors don't care, how about those who can't afford
the expense ? Either because their disks are already full and they
don't wan't to buy new ones or because buying new ones may mean
buying other hardware too or even because bandwidth cost them a lot
more tham disk space.
Do you tell them "hey drop debian then, it's not for you" ?
Not so long ago the local debian mirror I run for a local network
was 20Gb and everything was ok, now our free space is narrowed
even if we could afford a new disk, we may abandon the mirror
because of bandwidth cost.
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