persistent storage hardware: recommendations, comments, and opinions please
>>>>> "dman" == dman <dsh8290@rit.edu> writes:
dman> First my current setup:
dman> 10GB Maxtor IDE disk
dman> Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
dman> 5.6G 5.1G 271M 96% /
dman> 4.0G 2.5G 1.3G 64% /home
dman> 125M 40k 124M 1% /tmp (tmpfs, not on-disk)
dman> I want to buy another disk to augment this. There's not enough room
dman> on this one for my music _and_ an OS (and working files -- homework,
dman> etc).
dman> I stopped by the local computer shops and took some notes on the
dman> available hardware. I'd like some comments, recommendations,
dman> opinions, and other info you may have. (prices in USD)
dman> Disks :
dman> Western Digital WD400BBRTL
dman> 40GB, 7200 rpm, Ultra ATA 100, 8.9 ms seek time, 2MB buffer, $130
dman> Western Digital WD180ABRTL-120
dman> 18GB, 5400 rpm, Ultra ATA 100, 12.0 ms seek time, 2MB buffer, $80
I've never had a bad experience with WD.
dman> The one shop also had 2 Maxtor disks, but I'm not sure I want another
dman> one of them.
dman> Can someone provide a comparison of Ultra ATA 100 and SCSI? Which is
dman> faster and/or more reliable?
I'm only using ATA66 and getting 18 MBytes/s WRITE speed. Good enough
to capture 640x480 AVI @ 30fps. scsi drives are always more expensive
so unless you are running a real server I'd just stick with IDE. IDE
drives are just incredibly inexpensive these days (at least in the
US).
dman> Does RAID restrict the combination of disks I can have? IIRC RAID 0
dman> is no redundancy, and RAID 1 is simply maintaining two copies on
dman> separate disks. If so, then wouldn't both disks need to be the same
dman> size?
Don't think so. You partition them and start RAID partitions. So it
should be no problem to use different disks. From an efficiency point
of view you want the disks to be of similar performance. Once again,
unless you really need it I wouldn't mess with RAID.
Unless of course you just want to because you want to.
Brian
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