You will definitely need that 64 bit PCI bus. You might want to watch out
for your memory bandwidth as well. (i.e. get something with interleaved
memory). Standard PC doesn't get but 800MB/s peak to main memory.
FWIW, you are going to have trouble pushing anywhere near 90MB/s out of a
gigabit ethernet card, at least under 2.2. I don't have any experience w/
2.4 yet.
On Mon, 10 Jul 2000, Seth Vidal wrote:
> > If you can afford it and this is for real work, you may want to
> > consider something like a Network Appliance Filer. It will be
> > a lot more robust and quite a bit faster than rolling your own
> > array. The downside is they are quite expensive. I believe the
> > folks at Raidzone make a "poor man's" canned array that can
> > stuff almost a terabyte in one box and uses cheaper IDE disks.
>
> I priced the netapps - they are ridiculously expensive. They estimated 1tb
> at about $60-100K - thats the size of our budget and we have other things
> to get.
>
> What I was thinking was a good machine with a 64bit pci bus and/or
> multiple buses.
> And A LOT of external enclosures.
>
> > If you can't afford either of these solutions, 73gig Seagate
> > Cheetahs are becoming affordable. Packing one of those
> > rackmount 8 bay enclosures with these gets you over 500gb
> > of storage if you just want to stripe them together. That
> > would likely be VERY fast for reads/writes.
>
> > The risk is that you'd lose everything if one of the disks crashed.
>
> this isn't much of a concern.
> The plan so far was this (and this plan is dependent on what advice I get
> from here)
>
> Raid0 for the read-only data (as its all on tape anyway)
> Raid5 or Raid1 for the writable data on a second scsi controller.
>
> Does this sound reasonable?
>
> I've had some uncomfortable experiences with hw raid controllers -
> ie: VERY poor performance and exbortitant prices.
> My SW raid experiences under linux have been very good - excellent
> performance and easy setup and maintenance. (well virtually no maintenance
> :)
>
> -sv
>
>
>
>
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Keith Underwood Parallel Architecture Research Lab (PARL)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Clemson University
