SCSI drives recommendations

[Richard Cottrill]

I think that kind of misses the point of what I was getting at. RAID5 is good for making a big, reliable volume. It is not, however, very good at 'fast'. On a volume with many discs RAID5 is much more efficient (in terms of capacity) than simple mirroring; but not as fast (those parity values need to be calculated).

In RAIDs a bigger number doesn't necessarily mean 'better'.

Richard

> -----Original Message-----
> From: linux-admin at lists.samba.org [mailto:linux-admin at lists.samba.org]On
> Behalf Of Karun
> Sent: Monday, January 21, 2002 8:54 AM
> To: Daniel McNamara
> Cc: linux at samba.org
> Subject: Re: SCSI drives recommendations
> 
> 
> On Monday 21 January 2002 07:41 pm, you wrote:
> > Backups have not been left out on this box with it being fitted 
> (in a few
> > days) with a DAT tape drive and I plan to implement a layered backup
> > scheme. In regards to the RAID I really do have very little idea of what
> > I'm after as I have never worked with it before.
> >
> > To clarify at bit further the system will be running a web 
> server, serving
> > sites that have SQL backends. Almost all the data barring basic 
> templates
> > is to be pulled out of the SQL databases. I realise there are a 
> number of
> > levels of RAID (which I will need to read up on as I'm still not up to
> > speed with it) but I'm guessing what I'm after is mirroring.
> >
> > The SQL databases will be not only read via the web interface but also
> > written to. One site to be hosted on it is a rather large auction site
> > which, given the way it's operating on the current NT (eewww) 
> web server,
> > could produce a fair bit of strain on the system.
> >
> > Having done some looking around it seems that new SCSI disks are quite a
> > lot more expensive than their IDE counterparts (not that I'm terribly
> > surprised this). Does anyone have a favourite retailer of  new 
> / used SCSI
> > hard drives? Basically I'm building this machine out of my own pocket in
> > order to show my work place that we can do a lot more with Linux on less
> > hardware and certainly for a lot less in terms of licensing 
> costs (I think
> > our last audit showed we were paying in order of  nearly 
> $7,000/year in MS
> > windows licensing alone, I'm not even going to into how much the MS SQL
> > server licences cost).
> >
> > Hopefully I can get this machine running really well and 
> replicate some of
> > the sites the NT server already is, in order to show a direct comparison
> > between the machines performance. If anyone else has any hints, tips,
> > pointers or just plain insults send them over as any help would 
> be great.
> >
> > Cheers
> >
> > Daniel
> >
> >
> >
> 
> 
> You probably will want raid 5 or similiar.
> 
> Karun
>