<quote who="O Polite"> > First I think that I should get faster disk I/O than I have today. > So for the first time ever I'm considering some RAID solution. > > In your experience what will get the best price / speed performance > ratio? > > Software IDE/RAID > Software SCSI/RAID > IDE RAID controller card > SCSI RAID controller card > > Or maybe just having diffrent partitions on diffrent drives?
if all your looking for is performance, software IDE/raid has the best ratio. pick up a Promise aTA/100 controller, hook 4 7200RPM drives to it and put it in RAID0. If you want more reliablity, get another promise controller and 4 more drives, put them in raid0, then do a raid1 between the 2 controllers. note you will need at least a 450watt power supply to do this. I reccomend PC Power & Cooling for their PS. high RPM fans, big heatsinks in the power supply keep it cool and reliable. that can be a messy setup though(IMO). You could pick up a 3ware 7000 series controller(with 8 ports) and do it in hardware(less messy). I haven't used the 7000 series so i reccomend checking compadiblity before you get it. I have used the 6800 series, and for a while now they have been decent. Just be sure do not skimp on power supplies and do not buy IBM drives. 85% of my problems were caused by weak power supplies and IBM drives. The 6800 series is no longer in production and may be difficult to find as it is end-of-life'd. SCSI is much more expensive, but is more reliable in my experience, I may of had 2 SCSI drives fail in the past year and a half, and i have had about 18 or 19 IDE drives fail(13 of which are IBM) in the same time period. If given the choice i'd go with SCSI any day of the week. but depends how much your willing to spend. I run: 2 x 6 disk RAID10 arrays on 3ware controllers 1 x 4 disk RAID5 array on 3ware controller 4 x 2 disk RAID1 arrays in software raid 2 x 2 disk RAID0 array in software raid 2 x 4 disk RAID5 array in software raid 1 x 4 disk RAID5 array hardware SCSI raid(forgot the vendor, the same one that VA Linux uses)1 x 8 disk RAID5 array on hardware SCSI raid(sun solaris) lotta raid .....most of my drive failures were on 4 disk raid5 arrays hooked to 3ware 6800 series raid cards using IBM drives. one time i had 3 disk failures in 2 systems within 24 hours, wiping out the array in one of the systems. ibm bad. i used to love their drives..wonder what happened. nate
