[plug] [OT] opinions: SCSI hard disks

[Bernd Felsche]

On Thu, Apr 24, 2003 at 11:03:36AM +0800, Ben Jensz wrote:
> I'm looking at getting a new file server (Linux/Samba) here at
> work as our current one has pretty much reached capacity and can
> be pretty damn slow at times.

What's the bottleneck?

> I think I've made my mind up on the base server (an IBM xSeries 235), 
> but there is absolutely no chance that I'm going to put IBM hard disks 
> into it.  I'm looking at other brands and am wondering what others have 
> had good experiences with recently in terms of SCSI hard disks?  The 
> machine has onboard Ultra 320 SCSI (68pin) and I'm going to have it 
> setup in the form of one system drive and 4 in hardware RAID 5 (with the 
> ServeRAID 5i adaptor).  Looking at a drive capacity of 36Gb for all of 
> the drives.

The machine has 6 hot-swap (SCA) drive bays as standard, and you can
squeeze another 3 into two of the 5.25" bays at the top.

I don't think you'll be getting "IBM" drives anyways. IBM has
stepped out of the hard drive business apparently and it's now made
by Hitachi Data Systems. Although I appreciate the bad experience
people have had with the IDE "Deathstar" drives, the DDYS and similar
SCSI are reliable; from what I can tell.

Seagate are an option. Their 15 krpm U320 drives are pretty good,
but time will tell how they stand up.

If you're buying new drives, you must, must, must get 15 krpm
drives. Half a dozen of them can saturate an U320 channel.

-- 
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