Re: KDE is now broken (Fwd: Heads-up: KDE4 hitting testing tonight (UTC) )
On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 06:28:46PM -0400, Douglas A. Tutty wrote:
> > Can you get a reliable tape drive, incl. some tapes, that stores at
> > least 1TB per tape, for max. $200 now?
>
> No. You can get used LTO-3 drives for about $250 on ebay. Tapes, of
> whatever capacity, end up costing about $50 each (I suppose unless you
> buy in great volume).
Then hard disks are probably cheaper.
> Other than web-browsing (e.g. firefox/iceweasel), I can do everything on
> my 486 if I have enough drives.
Hm, how do you manage without a web browser? And you can't play games
with pretty graphics.
> Look at the sweet-spot price point for used scsi drives, then get a used
> hardware raid card.
Nah, I'm not buying hard drives used. I've made bad experiences with
that.
> My HP NetServer LPr (dual P-II-450) came with 1 GB
> ram, two 36 GB scsi drives, and a HP NetRaid 1si card for $65 (and all
> cables, terminators, etc). You can get the raid cards cheap if used.
> Get a 14-bay external scsi hot-swap enclosure to hook up to it (another
> $50) and load it up with the scsi drives (of whatever size).
Then you end up with a bunch of small drives, eventually slow ones,
that make an awful lot of noise and heat and need a lot of power. And
do these servers have 68-pin LVD and 50-pin cables and terminators? If
they do, it would be cheaper than buying the cables new. But I'd have
to find someone who sells his server.
> Of course, if you have to pay for power, I guess at some point its
> cheaper to buy two 1TB drives.
Look at
http://www.buy.com/prod/hp-sas-internal-hard-drive-1tb-7200rpm-serial-attached-scsi-internal/q/loc/101/209741096.html:
You can get one 1TB SCSI disk for $620. It's a lot cheaper to buy two
SATA disks instead.
> > cables. You can get 1TB SATA disks for the price of the SCSI cables
> > and the terminators ...
>
> And forgo the reliability. You really comparing SATA to SCSI? SAS to
> SCSI sure; SATA to IDE sure.
I'm comparing the prices. I used to use SCSI disks only, but it has
become forbiddingly expensive. Keep in mind that $620 for a 1TB SCSI
disk is "cheap". Look at http://www.directron.com/wd10eacs.html: You
can get 1TB SATA for $86. That is $1240 for SCSI vs. $172 for
SATA. SCSI is almost 10 times as expensive --- if you want to pay the
difference, I'd gladly take the SCSI disk.
And what about reliability?
> Check ebay for the cables and terminators. There are lots of computer
> recyclers that only sell through ebay.
It's too troublesome to buy something off ebay here because there's no
reasonable way to pay. I'd have to send money orders for that.
> > In your case, you could have the computer for your wife boot over the
> > network and run it without any disks. Put the sever for that at some
> > place where it doesn't bother her.
>
> That would be about 500 feet away. First, I'd have to buy a lot that's
> big enough, then build a data centre 500 feet away...
Even if you put it into the basement?
> > You want to buy 8 sets of 3 disks each for your dayly and monthly
> > backups and an SATA controller that can do hotplug? That's about
> > $2500 --- maybe you can get a tape drive for that kind of money.
>
> Check out addonics for drive cubes; they hold a few drives and hook up
> with either USB or eSATA; there's your hot-swap.
But they want $250 for a casing that can hold only 3 disks. I guess I
meant 8 sets of 2 disks (not 3), so you'd end up with 16 disks and 8
cases: about $2700. It's not like I had money to waste.
And USB? I wonder what happens when you try to run two disks on an USB
port as RAID1. Is that fast enough to backup like 700GB over night?
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