Re: hardware quote comments?
On Mon, Feb 25, 2002 at 01:58:59PM -0800, Noah Meyerhans wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 25, 2002 at 12:21:33PM -0700, Jason Majors wrote:
> > Also, I'd recommend a 40GB or so IBM ATAPI hard drive instead of the
> SCSI
> > option. It'll cost you less and provide about the same access speed.
> Maybe
> > even faster access, if you get a 60 or 80 GB drive. Just make sure
> it's a
> > 7200RPM drive.
> No way! Those drives are very much worth the money. How can you
> compare a 7200 RPM IDE disk to a 10k RPM SCSI disk? IDE is cheap for a
> reason. It's junk. Don't put junk in such a nice machine!
There are several reasons that IDE is cheaper that SCSI:
(1) Buffer sizes--I haven't seen any IDE drives have 2 MB or less,
while comparable SCSI drives have 4 MB
(2) Seek times--usually twice as high on IDE.
(3) Rotational speed--usually higer on the more expensive drives.
(4) Warranty period--IDE drives usually have a 1 year warranty,
while SCSI tends to be 3 years.
Now, look at the cost deltas. For what it costs to get a SCSI
drive, I can usually get 2 larger IDE drives. With software
mirroring, I can get at least as good a read performance, with
write performance suffering only a little (if at all).
And I've got a mirror for when I loose one.
It's not about which technology is better--SCSI is clearly a better
technology (we'll see what serial ATA brings), it's about which is
more cost effective. I have several systems in my colo which have
300-500 GiB of storage in them, some of which (the 300 GiB systems)
would have been inordinately expensive to do with SCSI (4 73 GiB
scsi drives==Lotsabucks), and the larger (490GiB) systems would
have been all but impossible--these are 5 drive 2u rack systems.
I wish SCSI were 1/2 the price, then it would be easier to justify,
but with the current price points, it's often cheaper to build 2
complete systems off of IDE than 2 out of SCSI.
--
Share and Enjoy.
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