[plug] SATA & Debian

[Scott Middleton]

On Wed, 2004-01-14 at 17:16, Tim Bowden wrote:

> One of the motherboards I have been looking at from trinix.com.au is the 
>   Gigabyte GA-7N400PRO2 which has SATA RAID built in (Is this not /real/ 
> RAID?).  I have no idea yet how good it is but it seems to be an option. 
>   There are a number of SATA capable motherboards available for 
> reasonable money.
> 
Seriously from a guy that installs a couple of dozen servers a year,
"keep it simple". The main reason we use The Intel Entry servers is
simply ease of use. The Boot image you downloaded from us will *just
work* with an Intel Entry server. Mainly because it is the only board we
will use in a server. I was not always a big fan of Intel but clients
like it and it works well.

> As for downtime, a little is ok.  I don't need hot swap.  Even though 
> the spin rates on the SATA drives is no faster than the PATA drives, the 
> larger caches (8mb v 2mb) has to make them faster for writes at least 
> (or have I got it all wrong?).

Ultimately "who cares?" What is the top speed you can get on a 100Mb
LAN, when there is only 5 machines? Especially when you consider the
speeds of the modern ATA drives. The difference will be negligible, even
with a Gb LAN it wont make a lot of difference unless you are moving
files around measured in MB constantly.  A lot of people don't take LAN
bottle-necks into consideration, of-course none of this relevant if the
server is doing a lot of processing, then fast HDDs will be important!

We are quite happy for you to use our workshop and mirror to install for
your client. You have given us some business so wouldn't mind helping
you with this. We can also hook you up with our supplier, they keep an
entry server board in stock at all time for us (wholesale).

Another consideration that i feel is important is the case. Depending on
the environment the case is the next most important factor. A good case
with good air-flow really does increase the life expectancy of the
server. Lately we have been using Lian LI cases with 420W power supplies
so far the heat results have been good. Simply put a HDD will last
longer if they are kept cool.

Regards

-- 
Scott Middleton <scott at LinuxIT.com.au>