cheap san was (E: [NTLUG:Discuss] File Size Limit)

[Chris Cox]

Alfred Dayton wrote:
...
> the answer is to go with gb nics and switch with a new linux Box B with
> either the new serial ATA or
> 
> Even the previous ATA 133??  disk drive subsystem.  In the interim perhaps
> like the information indicates,
> 
> The purchase of a third party ATA 100 PCI controller card?
> 
> What arre your thoughts?


Well... unless you have some really good IDE drives, the drives
themselves (unstriped) will only do between 30-45M/sec (YMMV).
High end ATA drives can push more... but we're talking only
the more contemporary (usually high capacity) drives.

If I were sticking it out with ATA... I'd get the ATA133 based
card... it will have support for the larger drive sizes (above 137G).
Granted there may be a ATA100 card that supports the larger drives...
but probably not... since the speeds aren't great except on
the higher capacity drives, I think ATA133 is your best bet
anyway.

SATA is maturing... not sure if I'd take the plunge yet though.
The good news is that currently , the
high end SATA drives are coming with warranties that are similar
to SCSI drives (yippee!!).  As SATA becomes commodity, look for
this to drop back down again (back to 1 year again).

IMHO... if speed and reliability are important.. I'd go SCSI... but
I know that speed and reliability weigh against budget.  SCSI
is extremely fast and all drives carry 5 year warranties.
ATA gets worse when you consider that several drive manufacturers actually
tell you that their drives ARE NOT meant to be run 24x7.  I buy
my SCSI stuff on ebay... still more expensive than ATA stuff, but
affordable and I don't worry about my drives going out.
I like the Quantum/Maxtor drives... but people have wars over
SCSI vendor selection... all I know is I have many, many dead
Seagate Cheetahs at the office (actually, they've been returned
and replaced.. but most have died in less than 1 year!).

My 1st choice (on a budget):

HW Raid in a 64bit PCI slot, 66Mhz or higher (I use an LSI Elite 1600)
SCSI drives in a RAID config (RAID 10 if possible)
    Might consider RAID-3 I suppose for video (but I'm not video saavy)

If I had to go cheaper, I might (that's a big might) go SATA.. just not
sure about how well that works with Linux yet.