On Wednesday November 26, 2003 "Seth Bardash" <seth@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Brian, > > The latest 2 port board, the 7006-2 from 3ware costs only about > $120.00 and takes 2 IDE drives and makes them look like a single > SCSI disk to the O/S. /dev/sdx. It supports RAID 0 striping or > RAID 1 Mirroring. > > Shop around and you may be able to pick it up for less. It will > half your disk I/O overhead when used to mirror drives and even > gives you hot swap capability along with the mirroring. > > I use it in my workstation and we have many customers that need it for > data integrity to keep their workstations and servers up even > if a disk fails. Seth, I don't mean for this to dissolve into a "my dog's bigger than your dog", but I'd like to point out that Pricewatch is listing a MegaRAID 128 board with two U+W SCSI channels for $89. It supports RAID 0/1/5 in firmware. I'm using a 3-channel version with 128M of cache and fifteen refurb 4.5G 7200 rpm hard drives I picked up cheap a couple of years ago. They're set up on one channel as a single bootable 63G RAID5 array. With Seagate 73.4G 10K rpm drives I could add a terabyte array on the second channel for under $4.5K. The point I'm trying to make is that SCSI performance, capacity, and reliability can be had for a not too unreasonable price. To be sure, it will cost more than a corresponding IDE solution of the same capacity, but I'm told size isn't everything. :-) --Doc Savage Fairview Heights, IL
