[plug] [OT] opinions: SCSI hard disks

[Bernd Felsche]

On Thu, Apr 24, 2003 at 04:54:51PM +0800, Ben Jensz wrote:
> Bernd Felsche wrote:
> 
> >What's the bottleneck?

> Basically the machine is almost at storage capacity.  I could
> stick more drives in it, but really its not a good option.  The
> machine was my former desktop machine here (Athlon 600, 256Mb of
> RAM).  The other issues are that there is no decent removeable

Probably not a lot of grunt and few options to add fast disks; even
externally.

> storage for it.  I mean we have filled up around 80Gb of storage
> space and as the organisation I work for is trying to gain RTO
> (registered training organisation) status, as a requirement for
> that we need a proper and reliable data backup and recovery system
> which we currently do not have.  Copying data over the network to
> another machine doesn't qualify as "proper and reliable" - as
> thats currently what we have as a backup system currently.

It works if you're doing it in addition to something else... and
you'd be surprised how many sites backup over the network at offpeak
times.

> Also, the boss wants something he can remove and take home in a
> box with him.

Mini-ITX based network appliance running with 250GB hard drives in
removable caddies? Paint it bright green, screw on a sizeable handle
and you can rip it off the network in case of fire. :-)

> >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.

> The two 5.25" bays up the top will be taken up by an SDLT 320 tape
> drive :)

There's always the 14-bay expansion chassis!

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

> Seagate is what I was tending towards, either the 10K or the 15K.
> There is a fair price difference though between the 10K and 15K,
> especially when its 6 drives (1x system drive, 4x RAID and 1x
> spare).

Do users of the system get paid by the hour, or a piece-rate? :-)

Reducing rotational latency by 50% makes a big difference.
Higher sustained data rates for backups and copying files are a
bonus.

Your network bandwidth will limit the speed of data the users see.
Server-side processing is really the only way to make things really
fast.

-- 
/"\ Bernd Felsche - Innovative Reckoning, Perth, Western Australia
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