What is your anticipated access pattern for the drives? Do you see large files with streaming read/write or do you see lots of distributed small read/writes? The first would be best cost/performance with SATA 7.2k-rpm where the latter is better to be 15k-rpm SCSI.
SAS is going to be interesting soon and replace the 15-rpm SCSI drives but it's too early for that today. What amount of storage do you need? 1TB? 40TB? How do you plan to access it? If you have a compute cluster with 128 compute nodes all wanting to read/write to the same shared filesystem, then you will have to look at (expensive in cost and complexity) cluster filesystems or you buy a high-performance NFS server that can keep up with that many clients. Michael -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of David Mathog Sent: Friday, August 04, 2006 9:49 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Beowulf] File server dual opteron suggestions? Alan Scheinine wrote > David Mathog wrote: > > 4 x 74 Gb disks Ultra320 (or make an argument for a particular > SATA) > > Have you considered SAS? Only to the extent that I priced a few disks and then ran in the other direction. They may be somewhat faster than ultra320 when pushing random access writes to the limit but they cost significantly more and there are not a lot of them out there. Thanks, David Mathog [EMAIL PROTECTED] Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
