12 Mar
2002
12 Mar
'02
5:15 a.m.
On Tue, 12 Mar 2002, Christopher Smith wrote:
Oh.
-----Original
Message-----
From: Doc [mailto:doc@mdrconsult.com]
I've got a Mylex PCI 20mbit adapter
(DAC960[PL?]) I'll trade you
cheap. It's my opinion that on a non-server box, the gained speed is
minimal compared to the lost storage capacity suffered with
any reliable
RAID, unless you really need to mirror your data.
Well, I've got a Mylex EISA RAID that would probably have a
better chance of working. :) This machine has no PCI bus, Anyway, shouldn't a decent RAID allow you to
select the mode
so that it only does striping ?
Didn't I say "reliable"? Even RAID 0, plain striping, carries a
certain overhead in drivespace. The big problem is that with simple
striping you lose everything if you lose anything. RAID is *expensive*,
even if you get your adapter free. Drivespace overhead, tuning slices,
matching drives, power consumption, noise, etc. BIG cost is the
price of drives, for example 5x9G drives vs. 1x36G.
<My Not-So-Humble Opinion>
A multi-channel adapter or multiple adapters, running JBOD, with
intelligent filesystem groupings, will probably boost your speed as much
as RAID will. (Assuming a single-user general-use Unix desktop.) RAID
can be tuned to big sequential reads or writes, or a lot of small r/w,
but it's damn difficult to get middle-ground or all-around performance.
</My Not-So-Humble Opinion>
All that said, it's good practice and fun.
Doc