Larry Price wrote:

> We have an argument going here in the office regarding how to spec a
> storage array for a high volume, low-latency production server that
> would need to hold and serve approximately 1-3 TB of maildirs

Is the requirement to use maildir format nonnegotiable?  For many/most
workloads, I'd expect mbox format to run quite a bit faster.  If I
were you, I'd certainly spend an afternoon benchmarking both formats
before committing to maildir.

> the basic argument is about ata-raid vs. scsi

ATA is the present and the future.  SCSI is for old farts and
the terminally large-budgeted.

Here's the theoretical argument.  SCSI disks (not the whole RAID
systems, just the disks) are about 5X to 8X more expensive per
gigabyte than IDE.  With 5X more storage, you can configure your array
for a lot more replication and parallelism (i.e., reliability and
bandwidth), thus more than overcoming any real or perceived
disadvantages of IDE.

The practical problem is that because IDE was designed for PCs with
one or two drives, it's complicated to get more than about ten IDE
drives into a PC-architecture system.

-- 
Bob Miller                              K<bob>
kbobsoft software consulting
http://kbobsoft.com                     [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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