[ale] difference among Seagate, WesternDigital & Maxtor ?

[James P. Kinney III]

On Tue, 2005-10-25 at 14:33 -0700, Courtney Thomas wrote:

> So, I'm looking for a couple of sizable, at least a couple hundred MBs, hard 
> drives that I can reliably [and affordably] raid, somehow. I've read that 
> [IIRC] Escalade raid cards are good. But I have no objection to software raid 
> in that reliability and avoiding data loss are what I'm after, with 
> performance last, at least in this instance. 
> 
> Your thoughts appreciated,

I am rather partial to software RAID over hardware. The performance loss
due to software is very well compensated for by the compatibility issues
of not being tied to a specific hardware RAID vendor's card.

A common setup that I use just for data redundancy (and some speed boost
on reads) is a simple mirrored drive using a pair of different model
drives. I'll partition them so the drives have a large partition (or
two) of the same size. The unmirrored portion will be /boot, and /. I
use the mirrored partitions for the data portion that are not from a CD.

Oh. I almost forgot. I tend to spec SCSI for systems where downtime is
not an option (and I have ample fan space in the box). SCSI drives have
a 5 year warranty (for a good reason). The best of the SATA drives
(seagate w/8MB cache 7200 rpm) have a 3. The best of the IDE drives
(seagate w/8MB cache 7200rpm) have a 3 as well. Since the bandwidth from
the PCI bus is 4-6 time faster than a SATA drive, a 4 drive SATA card
will make maximum use of the bus system. Now the bottleneck is disk IO. 

I have had nothing but grief from Maxtor drives. I have not spec'd a
Maxtor SCI.

-- 
James P. Kinney III          \Changing the mobile computing world/
CEO & Director of Engineering \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC        \           at a time.          /
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GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
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