From owner-freebsd-chat Tue Dec 14 20:22:46 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from mentisworks.com (valkery.mentisworks.com [207.227.89.226]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 66B491533D for ; Tue, 14 Dec 1999 20:22:40 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from nathank@mentisworks.com) Received: from [24.29.246.17] (HELO mentisworks.com) by mentisworks.com (CommuniGate Pro SMTP 3.2b6) with ESMTP id 630037; Tue, 14 Dec 1999 22:22:48 -0600 Received: from [192.168.245.111] (HELO mentisworks.com) by mentisworks.com (CommuniGate Pro SMTP 3.2b7) with ESMTP id 1920025; Tue, 14 Dec 1999 22:22:30 -0600 Message-ID: <38571712.4010281D@mentisworks.com> Date: Tue, 14 Dec 1999 22:20:34 -0600 From: Nathan Kinsman X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en] (WinNT; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Terry Lambert , chat@FreeBSD.ORG Cc: Brett Glass , dscheidt@enteract.com Subject: A case for IDE based servers, was Re: dual 400 -> dual 600 worth it? References: <199912141853.LAA19833@usr02.primenet.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org 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