philippe Ameline wrote:
>>> Now why would anybody want to use a vastly inferior product
>>
>
> I must confess a great fault.
>
> I will probably soon install a Windows 2000 server system : the client wants
> Raid 5 with IDE drives and the accurate Adaptec card has no Linux drivers.
>
This is a classic case of why one would want to use Windows. My earlier point was
that
if you choose to go that way and are building an internet aware system, include the
manpower in your costs to keep up with the some 150+ security patches/year you will
need to evaluate and install.
>
> Why IDE and not SCSI ? : half the price, twice the capacity !
>
IDE and low cost RAID controllers are a good example on the low end. No matter how
you cut it, IDE has vast volume over SCSI and thus lower prices. SCSI and newer
fiber channel technology still has the overall performance lead. So if you are
building
a high performance disk I/O sub-system, the price/performance mix is more imporant
than the price/capacity mix.
By the way, with disk space so cheap anyway, RAID5 is not an attractive
architecture.
We prefer RAID10 or 01, which is striping with mirrors. The mirroring provides the
fault
tolerance (and read performance) and the striping provides most of the performance
(with one
exception: logging files need to be on a single mirrored volume because of the
sequential
write nature). Most RAID controllers provide these options.
