[ale] Really Large IDE drives

[Jeff Hubbs]

Dave -

It makes me wonder if there is becoming such a thing as a "Win-drive."  40GB
is a serious jump from what I thought was the current state-of-the-art in
drivedom, about 21GB.

I can't answer your primary question but I was wondering what manner of
"server" you were running, with an eye toward what characteristic you were
seeking to maximize (e.g., read speed, capacity, reliability).

Unless you are simply trying to go for maximum storage density (i.e., how
many GB you can cram into x cubic inches), I'd stay away from really big
drives.  Another case where big drives would be called for in a server would
be if the server is "loseable," by which I mean planets won't crash into the
sun or anything like that if it dies.  Servers whose primary mission is to
hold software and OS distributions for internal use might fall into that
category (I have done that before, at prev empl - made a volume set under NT
using 4 1.6GB drives, only to curse myself when one of the drives died and
trashed the whole volume - but no real harm done).

Even if it's for internal use, if you think you're going to be storing on
the order of tens of gigs, I'd be doing RAID, even if in software, using
smaller drives.  If you use RAID 5, you'll get faster reads.  I recant this
advice if all you are trying to maximize is bytes/$ (fancy way of saying "do
it on the cheap") and you still need to store tens of GB.

Another thing that was made mention of recently in Scientific American was
the notion of very large drives and fast data t'comm making random bit error
become a significant phenomenon.  For instance, at what size a drive would
you run a 50-50 chance of getting a flipped bit just while formatting the
drive?

There may be issues involving real-world performance of big drives that may
make them worth avoiding if speed matters to you.  I'm not absolutely sure
what is hype and what is not, but my understanding (as I've sorted it out)
is that more cylinders equates to less speed ONCE the drive gets fairly full
and has been read from and written to a lot in small pieces (as opposed to
written with large {>100MB} files that are mostly just read without
modifying, like if you were doing a streaming media server).  Now, there may
be something about these 40GB drives that negates that, such as if they have
more heads or two sets of heads on separate arms or some such, but if they
are pretty much conventional then I would think that the same concept(s)
would hold.


- Jeff


> -----Original Message-----
> From: David Corbin [mailto:dcorbin at corvusware.com]
> Sent: Monday, December 13, 1999 10:10 AM
> To: ale at ale.org
> Subject: [ale] Really Large IDE drives
> 
> 
> I was about to order a really large IDE (40G) drive for my server.  At
> the very end of the detailed product description it lists "Windows 95"
> as a system requirement.  Is this just more of the knee-jerk response
> vendors have?  What's the largest IDE drive anyones ever used with
> Linux?
> 
> Thanks.
> -- 
> David Corbin 		
> Mach Turtle Technologies, Inc.
> http://www.machturtle.com
> dcorbin at machturtle.com
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