Quoting Nadav Har'El, from the post of Mon, 16 Dec: > Why do you insist on expensive SCSI and RAID hardware, when you can > (supposedly, I didn't really check) IDE disks for much cheaper?
well, most of the limitations of IDE are lower MTBF, higher latencies at high loads and otherwise same or lower performance costs more kernel time by far. since other than MTBF those points are inconsequencial, we have to look at the other points: 1. space. our box has no more free SCSI slots, not to mention internal IDE bays. you can connect an external RAID box though, but it is expensive, whether the drives in it are SCSI or IDE (yes, those exist). 2. limited number of disks: if we throw out the SCSI there is still only room (on the bus, donno about the bays) for 4 disks, one of which is now a CDROM for emergencies and installations. hence my idea to start from scratch with a machine from IBM, either bigger SCSI drives (two of 80?) or much much bigger IDE drives (two of 120 cover us for at least 2 more years, and by then 120 giggers will become cheaper yet). OTOH if members of IGLU would like to purchase the hardware themselves I can get the spakning new 120GB 7200RPM drives from WD (8 beg cache) at $200+- and no VAT from my employer (3 years warrenty yada yada). what we need to decide is: 1. are we looking for a hardware donor that will force us to stick to a hardware/software configuration? 2. are we looking for a donor of generic hardware that just wants his name on the site? 3. are we looking for a money donor that wants a banner and lets us buy our own hardware? 4. are we collecting our own money for the cause? and finally are we doing any of the above for a full new server or just an additional external RAID? we've been through this and stayed STUCK. my opinion is that an external raid costs more than a new P4/P3 machine, plus the disks that go into it will be IDE rather than SCSI. therefore it makes sense to get a complete pizza with two 120gig IDE disks with a free bay for a future third. I say we set it up in ADDITION to the current IGLU for now and slowly balance some/all of the old machine's web functions. We format it as Debian, use the old diskspace as ftp2.iglu for extra space and maybe still keep it as a backup server for web as well. if we install a dedicated cross-cable ethernet on a second interface we can do a lot more tricks for our users, such as cross-mounting the FTP direcotories and other tricks. either way it's cheaper and more flexible than setting up an external RAID. -- Earthly pleasure Ira Abramov http://ira.abramov.org/email/ This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
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