12 Oct
2004
12 Oct
'04
9:08 a.m.
On Tue, 12 Oct 2004, Jules Richardson wrote:
re: IDE
Oh, got it now, I agree 100% -- a big 'data copy' (rsync,
whatever) will certainly bog the line. But it won't cause
mail transfer problems, but mail transfer delays, lower overall
throughput. TCP/IP is quite robust, and SMTP is reeeeeeeaallly
well tested!
Where is it required that a computer have 100% free unfettered
access for each and every process for each and every second? If
backups take 30 minutes of the day, I say BFD (YMMV). If it's
taking 4 hours there may be a problem, but really, CPUs are not
sentient, they don't care if they work hard 100% of the time
(barring heat removal :-)
yes the drives are cheaper; but I was asking about the
performance more
than anything - I pretty much lost touch with IDE 5 years ago apart from
a handful of machines, so I don't know where it's at in terms of
performance under load (in a real scenario, forget marketing hype! :-)
Good. I don't look much at performance specs, but performance
in place. On the whole a good EIDE layout (eg. one drive per
controller) is as good as anything.
Reliability's a tricky one. Historically I've
had both IDE and SCSI
disks go bad in desktop environments (i.e. lots of power cycling and
less of a controlled dust-free environment), but I've only ever seen IDE
disks completely blow up in the servers I've known that happened to have
IDE disks rather than SCSI. Maybe that was just luck of the draw,
though.
I'm guessing, but it might be a version of 'derate for
reliability'; most SCSI drives don't approach the bytes/spindle
that IDE drives do. Maybe it's simply NEW 20gb drives are more
reliable than NEW 160gb drives for various mfgr reasons.
you'll
never get > 25 - 50 Mbits/sec through it; that's 5
megabytes/sec peak.
My point was only that if you rsync to a disk on a different machine
over ethernet (as I thought you were suggesting, but I could well be
wrong!) then you do risk saturating the link at the time of the rsync,
which I'd assume *could* lead to mail message transfer problems. Some problems, sure - but surely things like disk
failure are an
anticipated problem that's guaranteed to occur at some point, and if you
*want* a server with near-perfect uptime then that needs planning for?
Oh I want it all too, I'm just not willing to pay for it :-)
Seriously, between an average well-run PC box and a high-end
RAID server, we're not talking orders of magnitude improvement.