On Friday 12 December 2003 02:50, leam wrote: > 2. There seems to be different levels of board; for example the > 100MHz small system and the high-end boards that can handle up to 16 > drives. Can you address recommendations on *both* ends of the > spectrum? Are there eother product catagories? I still stand by 3ware for both ends. Unless I'm doing striping, and no redundancy, then it's worth the extra $$ for me to have a stable raid card with the fun features of hardware raid, and fully supported (out of the box) Linux drivers. > 3. Please support statements of opinion with evidence of fact. "You > are wrong." is an opinion. "3ware boards did not have a fast chipset > until the 7xxx series." is a more factual statement. "I run 3ware > boards with 16 disks in a production environment" is a statement of > fact. What conclusions we draw from that are opinions. :) The company I work for (Pogo Linux http://www.pogolinux.com) sells 3ware based systems by the dozens each month, all to people who use them and use them successfully in production environments. Our products range from 1u 4drive systems, 2u 9/12 drive systems, and 3u 9/16 drive systems. (first number is parallel IDE, second number is SATA). All our customers throughly enjoy their system, as long as they don't use ext3 on it. ext3 is horribly slow as of late. All our worksations also have 3ware options for them, usually in the 2 disk or 4 disk setup, PATA or SATA. Our workstation users have been most happy with these setups, especially when they realize how easy it is to recover from a failed harddrive. > For those of us new to some of these things, what sort of enclosure > would you use for a larger (4-8-16) disk set? For larger disk sets, rackmount chassis are usually the best way to go. Supermicro makes some great 1u 4drive sets, and there are various vendors that make 2u (9/12 drive) and 3u (9/12/16 drive) chassis. All hotswap (SATA, some even PATA). Very nice to see a bank of racks filled with 3u 16drive chassis, all blinking lights like crazy. When you get up to the 16drive arena, or even the 4/8/12 drive arena, RAID 10 becomes an option for ultimate performance with really high redundancy. Given the 2TB limit of Linux, you can reach that limit with 250gig drives in a 16bay chassis. In Raid 10 you can drop a total of 8 disks before you lose any data. Performance is extremely fast in this setup, and is a favorite of a lot of our customers. Anyway, I'll step down from the soapbox now, hopefully that will help you get up to speed. -- Jesse Keating RHCE MCSE (geek.j2solutions.net) Fedora Legacy Team (www.fedora.us/wiki/FedoraLegacy) Mondo DevTeam (www.mondorescue.org) GPG Public Key (geek.j2solutions.net/jkeating.j2solutions.pub) Was I helpful? Let others know: http://svcs.affero.net/rm.php?r=jkeating
Attachment:
pgpD6V6bKt6qf.pgp
Description: signature
