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From: Joe Greco <jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com>
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Subject: Re: /usr/obj size
To: michaelv@MindBender.serv.net (Michael L. VanLoon -- HeadCandy.com)
Date: Tue, 5 Nov 1996 11:40:12 -0600 (CST)
Cc: richardc@csua.berkeley.edu, isp@FreeBSD.org
In-Reply-To: <199611050817.AAA15590@MindBender.serv.net> from "Michael L. VanLoon -- HeadCandy.com" at Nov 5, 96 00:17:54 am
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> The reason I keep saying 2GB is because that seems to be the current
> "sweet spot" where the price per gigabyte is lowest, and the
> performanc is at least "good".

For price, 2GB is your ticket.  For performance, 1GB is (I have recently
paid the "premium" to get a dozen and a half ST-31055N's... ouch...  it
hurts, but you get almost double the throughput for having spent about
30% more than the 2GB drives would have cost).

> Of course 7200RPM drives are faster.  But, if you can buy an extra
> drive or two, and put that in the stripe set, with the money you save
> by going 5400RPM, that extra drive might just make up the difference
> in speed.  So, to say it the other way around: no, you don't need
> 7200RPM drives.

Yes.  I will put a two-disk stripe of a pair of ST-31055N Hawk-2 drives
(9ms, 5400RPM, etc) up against a single ST-32550N Barracuda (8ms, 7200RPM)
any day and beat it by a fair margin.  And relatively speaking, with the
32550N's hovering around $650 and 31055N's around $320, tell me what
makes more sense to do  :-)

But I will grant that the 32155N's, in the low 5's are attractive too.

... JG