Re: SCSI or IDE
> On Wed, 27 Nov 2002 23:30, Jones, Steven wrote:
> >
http://www.promise.com/product/product_detail_eng.asp?productId=93&familyI
d
> >= 7
> >
> > i was actually looking at one of these.
> >
> > For my simpler needs, data protection is important but there isnt lots
of
> > it so 2 x 20 gig disks mirrored is heaps. I would like to keep the
uptime
> > up, so was thinking of this solution, anybody tried one? Its for my
web
> > server with all of a 128k connection so sucky performance isnt an
issue as
> > its bugger all hits.
>
> If you only need RAID-1 then software RAID is probably best. It's
cheapest
> and provides much better performance than most hardware RAID's. Also if
you
> only need 20G of storage then you still may want to consider 120G
drives,
> they are much faster than 20G drives.
On the other hand... when I was experiementing with all this way back
(like maybe 1-2 years ago... Russell was helping back them too ;-) ), I
found that software RAID in some cases won't work properly if something
has died... for example, from memory one of the hard disks failed. The
BIOS stalled on that HD at POST and wouldn't continue normally. It didn't
failover to the 2nd hard disk (this was RAID 1). A hardware RAID setup
would be able to handle this as the hardware RAID solution would be
designed to prevent such things from completely stalling the system and
preventing startup.
Of course, hardware RAID is not as flexible, and cheapo hardware RAID may
not be much more intelligent than the motherboard's onboard IDE
controller. But it's gotta have a least a bit more intelligence.
> > However for another job Im thinking of elsewhere (a 2 node cluster)
though
> > it would be a disaster. 3meg a sec just wont cut it, i can get 16 meg
off a
> > second hand scsi setup for the same dosh.
>
> You can get 40 meg from a software RAID-1 on IDE drives more easily and
> cheaply.
Note that you probably won't be able to go above 2 HDs, as you certainly
won't want to put more than 1 HD on per ... oh... per cable (whats the
word... per port? per channel?). Putting more than 1 on lowers performance
greatly, so you can forget about doing RAID 5. You COULD go buy a PCI IDE
card, but then if you're going the hardware route you may as well get a
hardware RAID card.
Anyway, just my thoughts, as I've been in a similar situation. Software
RAID is certainly more flexible and may be faster than some hardware IDE
solutions, but it can fail under some situations. It's your own decisions,
but once you do it, stick with it as it DEFINATELY is not fun to move
these kind of things around ;-)
Sincerely,
Jason
http://www.zentek-international.com/
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