[Gllug] IDE RAID

[Simon Faulkner]

Thanks for all the replies.

We are looking for volume rather than speed or reliability/uptime so
shutting down for a disk swap would not be a problem.

The data will go to AIT tape overnight (well the last month or so)

These guys are generating about 50 Gb a month and need to be able to go back
12 months with ease.

I think that IDE will do although I will quote a similar size in SCSI

IDE - £1800
SCSI - £4400

I guess I know their answer already :-)

Simon

-----Original Message-----
From: gllug-admin at linux.co.uk [mailto:gllug-admin at linux.co.uk]On Behalf
Of Tethys
Sent: 11 June 2003 17:53
To: gllug at linux.co.uk
Subject: Re: [Gllug] IDE RAID



Richard Cottrill writes:

>Is there a specific requirement for a hardware RAID?
>
>I understand that
>software RAIDs are generally significantly quicker (something to do with
>the outrageous speed of modern processors).

But what do you do when it goes wrong. Software RAID doesn't support
hot swapping a failed drive. I'm not even sure if hardware RAID yet
manages to do this reliably for IDE. It's commonplace for SCSI RAID
arrays, though.

Essentailly, if you care enough about resilience and fault tolerance,
go for a hardware SCSI array. If you just want a cheap, large amount
of RAID protected storage, and can afford some downtime to change
disks in the event of failure, then go for IDE.

The real clincher here is price. IDE is *significantly* cheaper than
SCSI, and unless you really can't afford the downtime (or unless you
need really large amounts of performance and/or capacity), it's hard
to justify the cost of SCSI.

Tet

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