Re: SCSI or IDE
On Sun, 24 Nov 2002 23:39, John wrote:
> There's quite little point in having IDE for my work on the most mission
> critical servers. We also have a habit of netbooting many of our
> machines. POP/SMTP/HTTP/HTTPS/DNS are done via netboot. This reduces our
> reliance on drives in tons of systems.
It does however increase your reliance on the network. However it's an
interesting concept.
One problem with netbooting is that you then become reliant on a single Filer
type device instead of having multiple independant servers. If each server
has it's own disks running software RAID then a single disk failure isn't
going to cause any great problems, and a total server failure isn't going to
be a big hassle either.
Another problem that has prevented me from doing such things in the past is
that the switches etc have been run by a different group. I have been unable
to trust the administrators of the switches to not break things on me... :(
> I would be happy to know if there
> are controllers and setups that allow hotswappable IDE RAID5 - I'd be
> very interested if there were (please feel free to let me know on or off
> list).
http://www.raidzone.com/Products___Solutions/OpenNAS_Overview/opennas_overview.html
> IF you can get a combination of good IDE drives with good IDE
> controllers that don't peg your CPU usage and money is an issue, go with
> IDE. Never put two RAID1 IDE drives on the same channel (primary or
> secondary). Put one on each for safety.
You can say the same about SCSI.
If you get a high-end RAID product from Sun then you won't have two drives in
the same RAID set on the same SCSI cable.
One final thing, the performance differences between ReiserFS, Ext3, and XFS
are far greater than that between IDE and SCSI drives of similar specs. All
three file systems perform best for different tasks, benchmark for what you
plan to do first.
--
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http://www.coker.com.au/postal/ Postal SMTP/POP benchmark
http://www.coker.com.au/~russell/ My home page
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