Re: [Declude.JunkMail] Raid Controller

[Matt]

That's the company that I was told about before.  I think you might be selling serial ATA short though. First, these cards have a separate bus for each drive, so a 4 port serial ATA RAID card can handle much more than any single drive can push.  No issue there. Secondly, I've been reading reviews for over a year now on Tom's hardware that show IDE drives out performing 15K Cheetahs.  This wasn't always the case but it appears that there has been a lot of effort in the IDE realm and very little in the SCSI realm.  The SCSI protocol is at least a decade old as well and I see no reason why you should just simply keep doubling the bus with that technology when you can pump more data over a simple firewire or USB cable (along with power). The real question though is how well are these drives made in comparison to the SCSI ones.  SCSI is of course just the interface and has no effect on the reliability of the drive.  It used to be that they just simply engineered the SCSI drives better, but I don't know that this is entirely the case now, or at least if there enough of a difference for it to really matter.  The current SATA drives are generally suggested to be better than IDE, but I wouldn't expect for one to be as reliable as a drive that costs 4 times as much if not more.  The incremental boost to reliability may also be moot depending on the application.  I plan on having two different gateway machines that only do scanning.  Redundancy will be achieved with multiple machines each capable of handling 100% of the total mail volume.  If one fails, big whoop, replace the bad drive and you're back in business. Cost becomes an issue for a non-corporate entity, and I can afford to dedicate more drives to more distinct tasks with SATA, and therefore I should be able to achieve better performance. The only variable for me that needs consideration is whether or not the current crop of SATA RAID cards are up to the task.  I haven't seen any deep reviews comparing say a 3ware card to a LSI card. Please feel free to tear any of this stuff down.  I'm about to make some purchases myself and I hate making mistakes when it comes to such investments. Matt Keith Anderson wrote: There are a lot of SATA RAID (0/1/5) options. Example: http://www.3ware.com/products/serial_ata.asp SATA is good for high performance, low-end servers, but you would never want to attempt a big RAID-10 rack with SATA. Actual throughput speeds of SCSI/160 drives (10K or 12K RPM) are still twice as fast as the fastest SATA drives. Although SATA is technically capable of 150 throughput, the drives are cheaper and slower, so you're punching data in and out of the on-board cache at that speed, which will help a desktop perform well, but for constant writes on a high-volume server, you're not going to get better performance than if you just use ATA/133. SCSI also goes up to SCSI 320 and SCSI 640, and SCSI has protocols that allow you to shut down and replace a drive without interrupting operation. SCSI/640s are used in high-end machines (e.g. nCube or IBM-900/990) where data is flying on and off the drives faster than most PC's can access memory. Reliability is also a big issue, and a lot of money goes into these drives to insure they will never fail. I've never even heard of an IBM 900-series SCSI 320 or 640 drive failing. If it has happened, IBM has done a good job of covering it up, or maybe I've been lucky. Certainly SCSI is not the best economic choice for a desktop workstation, but people that like to play games on PC's that have more computing power than even existed on the entire Earth before 1980 will do strange things. Here's something else-- if you crack open the latest Maxtor 300 Gig drive and compare it with the latest Maxtor 250 gig drive (of the same line), you'll find that there's not a lot of difference between the two. Yet one costs much more than the other. That's what happens when the engineering and marketing departments get together to plan deployment strategies. Keith -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Matt Sent: Wednesday, March 24, 2004 9:21 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [Declude.JunkMail] Raid Controller Has anyone thought about serial ATA? I don't see any reason why someone can't build a high quality RAID controller to use these drives, and it appears that they are building high quality drives for serial ATA. A friend told me there was at least one such card on the market already, though I forget what it was. If you ask me, SCSI is an overpriced racket. [AUTOMATED NOTE: Your mail server [63.147.33.8] is missing a reverse DNS entry. All Internet hosts are required to have a reverse DNS entry. The missing reverse DNS entry will cause your mail to be treated as spam on some servers, such as AOL.] --- [This E-mail was scanned for viruses by Declude Virus (http://www.declude.com)] --- This E-mail came from the Declude.JunkMail mailing list. To unsubscribe, just send an E-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], and type "unsubscribe Declude.JunkMail". 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