[ale] RAID "inexpensive" disks?

James P. Kinney III jkinney at localnetsolutions.com
Mon Sep 30 23:28:49 EDT 2002


Yep, scsi doesn't qualify as "inexpensive". But the big difference is in
the anticipated lifetimes as measured by manufacturers warranties.

Most IDE drive come with a 1 year. Some have only a 90 day. A few
actually have a longer, 3 year warranty. That count is dropping fast.

SCSI drive almost always come with at least a 3 year warranty. Many come
with a 5 year warranty. The are built to PERFORM for extended periods of
time. IDE is engineered to be used intermittently. 

A big factor in the price difference is the degree of on-disk brains
that scsi has compared to IDE. IDE drives are pretty dumb. 

RAID stuff:

Software raid is pretty cool. Using a trio of drives, I had a small boot
drive and a pair that made up a raid mirror for the user data. It is not
as fast as hardware raid, but works on nearly anything. Good quality IDE
drives and software RAID are "The Poor Man's RAID Solution".

Of course, 15k rpm Ultra160 SCSI Cheetahs on an Adeptec 3 channel RAID
in a RAID 5 setup is screaming fast.

Cost is NOT a linear relation to data through put :(

On Mon, 2002-09-30 at 21:56, Stephen Turner wrote:
> uh, just an observation but :-p raid is typically used with scsi disks,
> which arent inexpensive, on the contrary, they seem to be storing less
> than ide and more expensive.... oh well on to my question, since ide is
> inexpensive, and reaching nice speeds would it be appropriet to use ide in
> a raid formation? would it be near performance of normal raid with scsi? i
> was interested in opinions from experienced guys and i dont know any
> myself except this mailing list so :), also whats your opinions on best
> performance/redundant configurations? i noticed raid 0,1 configuration
> seemed to be nice, striping and mirroring together (which is possible
> right?) running 2 raid arrays, each with 3 or so disks stripped and the
> first and second array mirrord, .... 6 disks total, one fast and redundant
> array right? im sorry for the possible ignorance in this letter, i have no
> experience with raid and im just trying to get berrings and such :) also
> just wanted to start a convo too so :) thanks for your time
> 
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James P. Kinney III   \Changing the mobile computing world/
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GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
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