Re: persistent storage hardware: recommendations, comments, and opinions please
<quote who="dman">
> Western Digital WD400BBRTL
> 40GB, 7200 rpm, Ultra ATA 100, 8.9 ms seek time, 2MB buffer,
> $130
>
> Western Digital WD180ABRTL-120
> 18GB, 5400 rpm, Ultra ATA 100, 12.0 ms seek time, 2MB buffer,
> $80
>
> Samsung SV4002H (looks like a used disk)
> 40GB, 54000 rpm, ATA 100, $110
>
> The one shop also had 2 Maxtor disks, but I'm not sure I want
> another one of them.
maxtor is currently my drive of choice. i had some bad
experiences a few years ago but that was ages ago. they
have much improved since. the opposite of IBM ..who
was once really reliable and now is complete shit, at
least for IDE(and yes i have joined the classaction
lawsuit against them for 12 failed drives in 4 months)
currently, i have 19 80GB maxtor drives in hardware raid arrays,
12 of them in raid10, and 5 in raid5, 2 in raid1
I have another maxtor 100GB not running raid. All
of these drives are pretty new(less then 6 months old).
No problems yet.. they are quite reliable sofar.
Not so fast(i think only 5400rpm..) but fast enough
for storage. I replaced 15 75GXP 75GB IBM drives with
the maxtors because of excessive failures on the IBMs.
I don't have experience with samsung though i wouldn't
personally buy them.
western digital has a rep for being somewhat reliable
but slow ..
vendors i would purchase for IDE:
1) maxtor
2) seagate
3) ..would keep shopping till i found one of the above..
>
>
> Can someone provide a comparison of Ultra ATA 100 and SCSI? Which
> is faster and/or more reliable?
depends what SCSI. My desktop at work has a single 9.1GB
Ultra160 SCSI hooked to an Adaptec 29160N Ultra160 SCSI
card. I also have an IBM 75GXP(the horror!) 46GB drive
hooked to a Promise ATA/100 IDE card. both are fast, but
the SCSI(which is IBM too) is CLEARLY much faster. it
just SCREAMS. I would take out the IBM IDE drive now
that ive had problems with the others but i don't want
to lose my 249 day 4 hours uptime. The OS is installed
on the SCSI, the IDE is used for data only. I don't
want to put high I/O on the IDE as i am certain it will
fail.
Ultra2 scsi i would still take over any IDE.
Ultra wide scsi is quite a bit slower, but IMO still
more reliable then IDE in the long run. I would
use ultra wide scsi over IDE as well. Only thing
holding me back from doing it is scsi drives are
still pricy for anything over 9GB.
anything less is worthless for HDs. SCSI2 is fine for
CDROMs and CDR/CDRW though.
>
> Adaptec SCSI Card 2906
> 7 devices, non-bootable, 10 MBps transfer, $63
> SCSI 1, SCSI 2, Fast SCSI 2
no good, at LEAST 2940UW(40Mbps) or better ..SCSI cards
(esp adaptec) are quite expensive. the ultra160 i have
still goes for at least $200. though the 2940UW should
be much less. They last much longer too. I am shocked
i am still using the 2940UW i got in a system in 1996.
Everything else from that system has been replaced 4-5
times over, not the scsi card though ! Note if you
get a older scsi card like the UW you'll have to be
sure your drives can run in narrow mode/SE mode(or both?)
otherwise you'll get massive scsi errors. most drives
can do this(i can't think of any that can't). but
keep it in mind if you decide to go scsi. diamond
used to make a SCSI card line, i forgot the name of
it, but it had a real good rep(i used their cards in
a few win32 machines for tape drives, worked good)
they were REALLY cheap. but they were also discontinued
long ago, not sure how good modern linux support is on
them or if you could even find a place that had one.
For most tasks i would happily use those diamond
scsi cards over the adaptecs. the diamonds topped out
at 40Mbps(UltraWide).
>
> Adaptec ATA RAID 1200A
> 2 ATA/100 channels, RAID 0 1 0/1 JBOD, bootable, $100
i wouldn't use it, driver support for linux isn't that
hot. last i heard binary only drivers for distros like
redhat. If you want good IDE controllers get Promise,
their ATA/66 and ATA/100 cards are awesome. I would not
buy the "raid" editions though. If you want real hardware
IDE raid go with 3ware. though i could tell some good
nightmares about 3ware ide raid..even after all the trouble
i'd still choose them over any other IDE raid vendor soley
due to better linux driver support. im waiting a good
6 months while i run my 4 3ware systems at the office
thorugh tests before i consider using 3ware at home
after the problems ive had :)
>
> CompUSA (Silicon Image Sil0649CL160)
> Ultra ATA 100, 2 channel, ACPI, $30
don't know ..but if its not a promise, i wouldn't use it
in my system(BTW promise ATA/100 is around $35)
> Does RAID restrict the combination of disks I can have? IIRC RAID
> 0 is no redundancy, and RAID 1 is simply maintaining two copies on
> separate disks. If so, then wouldn't both disks need to be the
> same size?
optimally both drives should be exactly the same, same model
same brand, and same speed. but if they are different, the
raid array will just be as big as the smallest drive. i setup
a software raid5 array on 4x9.1GB ultra2 scsi drives accross
dual 2940UW scsi cards, the drives were slightly different,
2 were identical IBM, 1 was a faster bigger IBM, the last was
a quantum ..works good though.
a warning for software raid5.. ive only setup 1 raid5
array(raid 0.96??) but from what i could see you could
not partition the array up in any way or setup multiple
raid5 arrays accross partitions(i do this often in raid0
and raid1). because of that i couldn't get a swap partition
on the disks with the raid array so i have a 4.5GB disk
in there for swap. I am able to boot off the array though.
I am forced to use ext2 as the filesystem as reiserfs
has severe problems under software raid5/kernel 2.2(i don't
use kernel 2.4 so i don't know if its any different ..)
not a big deal as i reboot once or twice a year at
best ..
I run Dual 40GB raid1(software) in my main desktop at home with IBM
drives(again, bought them before i suffered the rash
of failures).
my main fileserver at home has 2 x 40GB IBM drives, 1 x 46GB
IBM drive and 1 x 100GB maxtor drive, hooked to a promise
ata/100 card. another web/ftp server at home has a 4GB and
a 6GB drive(maxtors)
one big fat warning about Promise IDE controllers. i have
found on at least 4 different systems the IDE controllers
did NOT LIKE any cable longer then 18"(technically anything
longer violates the IDE spec..) and i get non-critical CRC
errors during high I/O. Enough to make me switch back to
18" cables. Some other controllers like the 3ware raid
has no visible problems with using cables as long as 36"
(40/80wire)
hope this helps
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