Date: Tue, 14 Dec 1999 22:20:34 -0600 From: Nathan Kinsman <nathank@mentisworks.com> To: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Cc: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org>, dscheidt@enteract.com Subject: A case for IDE based servers, was Re: dual 400 -> dual 600 worth it? Message-ID: <38571712.4010281D@mentisworks.com> References: <199912141853.LAA19833@usr02.primenet.com>
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I wont speak for IDE drives in general. However, I'm currently using Maxtor DiamondMax Plus hard drives for servers with moderate or lower workload. They have DualWave™ twin processors, 2 MB 100 MHz SDRAM cache buffer, 7200 RPM, and run on a UltraDMA 66. On a simple "dd" benchmark, I get 20 megs per second (yeah I know, single tasking). Coupled with an Arco DupliDisk IDE RAID 1 controller, this gives me up to 40 megabytes per disk of fault tolerant storage for around $500.00-$600.00 USD. This is also the price of one WD Enterprise 9 gig SCSI last I checked (a few months ago). I freely admit there are advantages to using SCSI, but with a the above configuration I can put together entire clusters of IDE RAID servers for the price of a single SCSI RAID system. Clearly any performance advantages of SCSI end at that point. DupliDisk-Bay 5.25 IDE RAID 1 Mirroring Controller ......$250 USD 20.40GB Diamond MAX Plus .................................$183 USD 20.40GB Diamond MAX Plus .................................$183 USD Along with rest of server hardware: AMD Athlon 500 ...........................................$181 USD Asus K7M Motherboard .....................................$150 USD 256 Megs SDRAM ...........................................$220 USD Intel EtherExpress Pro 100+ NIC ..........................$ 60 USD 3DCool Tornado 1000 Case .................................$155 USD (supercooling!) Floppy, keyboard, etc .....................................$ 50 USD approx And there you go, a high performance hardware RAID 1 server for FreeBSD at around $1400 USD, or the price of a cheap RAID controller. Buy 6 of them and build a server cluster that would massively outperform a similarly priced Dell Poweredge 4350 with Dual Pentium 600s and mirrored 18 gig SCSI. Prices obtained by Pricewatch. http://www.pricewatch.com - Nathan Kinsman, |nathan@kinsman.nu| don't send spamtrap@mentisworks.com Network Integrator, Systems Architect |FreeBSD/Linux/Netware/MS Windows| Phone/Fax: |Chicago| +1 312 803-2220 |Sydney| + 61 2 9475 4500 http://nathan.kinsman.nu | http://www.mentisworks.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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