On Mon, 6 Dec 2004, Peter Teuben wrote:
Having said that however, RAID *IS* a great way to squeeze performace out of older hardware for file storage and sharing purposes. Distributing reads/writes through a raid controller enables utilization of that maximum bandwidth, which would not otherwise be possible through a single drive - even newer drives.
It was suggested in an earlier message in this thread that a RAID controller has the added advantage that a dead/dying drive is not going take other drives with it. On an IDE controller, it was suggested, a dead master can kill a perfectly ok slave drive on the same controller. Can that be substantiated, or should this be considered some kind of folklore?
There are a numbers of ways in which a failing master can cause a slave to become inacessible until your remove it.
Besides that, software raid setups with two drives per ide port will have vastly lower performance than giving each drive it own port. at this point multiport sata controllers without a raid bios make a lot of sense in this context... for example the promise sataII150-tx4 or tx8 which are neither hardware raid nor promise driver based-raid controllers make a lot of sense...
shopping for parallel ata100 or 133 disks doesn't make a lot of sense at this point.
- peter
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