Re: [OT] Price / performance & Software RAID / Hardware RAID / IDE / SCSI
* O Polite (ol1@v10a.com) spake thusly:
> I'll be building a new development machine soon. It's been a while since
> the last time, and it's seems to be a lot harder today than the last
> time I did it a few years ago. There are so many CPU slots and memory
> types to choose from.
>
> First I think that I should get faster disk I/O than I have today. So
> for the first time ever I'm considering some RAID solution.
>
> In your experience what will get the best price / speed performance
> ratio?
>
> Software IDE/RAID
> Software SCSI/RAID
> IDE RAID controller card
> SCSI RAID controller card
>
> Or maybe just having diffrent partitions on diffrent drives?
There are motherboards with hardware ATA-100 RAID controllers,
these would give you the best bang per buck (if the controller
is well supported by the kernel): cheap IDE drives + high
performance of RAID.
For a workstation, I wouldn't bother, though -- just use a fast
ATA-something disk (most of them are nowadays), fast CPU (again,
they are fast nowadays) and lots of RAM. Tune up HD with hdparm
and you can get it to be almost as fast as SCSI (at the expense
of CPU cycles, but there are usually plenty of those).
If you have money to spend, fast SCSI RAID cards are the way to
go.
If you're really serious, graph system load with RRDtool
(or something) for a while -- if you see a lot of time spent
in WI/O, consider getting faster disks/SCSI. If you see a lot
of interrupts, consider getting SCSI. And so on.
Dima
--
The wombat is a mixture of chalk and clay used for respiration. -- MegaHal
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