[luau] INFO: Heavy duty storage needs

[R. Scott Belford]

If you intend to record most or all of the traffic moving over your network, you need to spend as much time thinking about your disk subsystem as your processor and Ethernet card. Last year Sandstorm spent several months comparing IDE drives with the UDMA100 interface to SCSI LVD-160 drives. We also explored a variety of RAID systems. The conclusion: today's IDE drives are significantly faster than SCSI drives costing two or three times more per gigabyte stored.

This is not the result we were expecting, and it goes directly against the conventional wisdom that says SCSI is inherently better than IDE. Nevertheless, it does seem to be the ugly truth, at least for straightforward read/write tests in a single-user environment. Although we saw the highest performance with a hardware-based RAID 5 system manufactured by Advanced Computer & Network Corporation, we saw nearly the same performance with a RAID 5 system based on the 3Ware Escalade 7000 RAID controller.

from an article about network data capture at

http://www.oreillynet.com/lpt/a//network/2002/04/26/nettap.html