120 gb is the Largest hard drive I can put in my 4550?

Tom:

Using RAID 5, I can use 5 x 80GB drives and get 320GB instead of buying two 250GB drives.
As for use of mirroring software, never. Too much overhead *always* use hardware based RAID
solutions.

In addition, you suggest the best solution and work you way down not the worst solutuion and
work your way up. That is why I start at RAID 5 SCSI. That's the starting point and the OP
can go down the list. And as also stated there is RAID 5 SATA.

I was just at SeaGate
Look at this SCSI drive
Seagate ST336607LC MTBF (Hours) 1,200,000 hours

I looked at SATA and Ultra ATA drives. They don't even list the MTBF value for these
drives. Why ? because they have a much lower MTBF maybe 80K hours at best. Meaning, they
have a higher failure rate. Below are three drives; SATA Ultra ATA and SCSI all approx
80GB. The drives have been selected to be similar to level the playing field. However, the
SCSI drive in all aspects beats the SATA and Ultra ATA except in price. The SCSI is more
expensive. rice comparisons done at http://www.cdw.com/

SATA drive
Model Number:ST380013AS
CDW Price $119.85
Capacity:80 GB
Speed:7200 rpm
Seek time:8.5 ms avg
Interface:Serial ATA
Internal Transfer Rate (Mbits/sec) 683
Max. External Transfer Rate (Mbytes/sec) 150
Avg. Sustained Transfer Rate (Mbytes/sec) >58
Average Seek (msec) 8.5
Average Latency (msec) 4.16
Multisegmented Cache 8192
Spindle Speed (RPM) 7200

Ultra ATA drive
Model Number:ST380011A
CDW price: $86.95
Capacity:80 GB
Speed:7200 rpm
Seek time:8.5 ms avg
Interface:Ultra ATA/100
Internal Transfer Rate (Mbits/sec) 683
Max. External Transfer Rate (Mbytes/sec) 100
Avg. Sustained Transfer Rate (Mbytes/sec) >58
Average Seek (msec) 8.5
Average Latency (msec) 4.16
Multisegmented Cache 2048
Spindle Speed (RPM) 7200

Ultra320 SCSI drive
Model Number:ST373307LW
CDW price: $409.50
Capacity:73 GB
Speed:10000 rpm
Seek time:4.7 ms avg
Interface:Ultra320 SCSI
MTBF (Hours) 1,200,000 hours
Internal Transfer Rate, ZBR (Mbits/sec) 475-840
Internal Formatted Transfer Rate (Mbytes/sec) 43-78
External Transfer Rate (mbytes/sec) 320
Track-to-track Seek Read/Write (msec) 0.3/0.5
Average Seek Read/Write (msec) 4.7/5.2
Average Latency (msec) 2.99
Spindle Speed (RPM) 10000


Dave

| Your approach is illogical and irrational. You know it, but refuse to admit
| it.
|
| The approach I use, which is, uh, rational, is two IDE hard drives and
| decent mirroring software.
|
| Heck of a lot cheaper than any SCSI Raid solution. SCSI is not measureably
| more reliable than today's IDE drives.
|
|
| Tom
|

 

Obvious lie with your original comment to me, liar.

You in spades, you pathetic excuse for a bullshit artist.

All you have ever managed is pathetic excuse for bullshit.

What a fucking wanker.

What a fucking wanker.

Even you should be able to bullshit your way out of your
predicament better than that pathetic effort, Lipman.

Duh. Pity RAID5 SCSI cannot be justified with that personal desktop
system The only sensible approach is IDE with that system.

Your problem. Anyone with a clue can work that out.

Completely and utterly irrelevant to what makes any sense
on a personal desktop system like the one being discussed.

No such animal. Thanks for that VERY spectacular
footshot, you pathetic excuse for a bullshit artist.

Thats the problem with posturing, you look extremely silly indeed
in the eyes of those who know anything about those systems.

RAID5 SCSI aint the only way to make a PC
reliable, you pathetic excuse for a bullshit artist.

That aint the only way to protect data assets,
you pathetic excuse for a bullshit artist.

You dont even know if the particular desktop system being discussed
even has any 'data assets', you pathetic excuse for a bullshit artist.

You dont even know if the particular desktop system being discussed
even has any 'data assets', you pathetic excuse for a bullshit artist.

Wota windy pathetic excuse for a bullshit artist.

RAID5 SCSI aint the only way to store photos
reliably, you pathetic excuse for a bullshit artist.

And wont actually do a damned thing to protect them against
theft of the system, fire, flood etc anyway. When the photos are
adequately protected against those real risks, she wont actually
need RAID5 SCSI, you pathetic excuse for a bullshit artist.

See above.

See above.

See above.

Pity no one ever said it did, you pathetic excuse for a bullshit artist.

You clearly aint gotta fucking clue about what real backup involves.

Hint: RAID5 SCSI doesnt cut it.

Never said you do, you pathetic excuse for a bullshit artist.

Duh. And you have to have real backup if the data matters, fool.

Hint: RAID5 SCSI doesnt cut it.

Duh. Pity RAID5 SCSI alone doesnt cut it. And if she has protection
against theft of the system, fire, flood etc, she wont actually need
RAID5 SCSI, you pathetic excuse for a bullshit artist.

More utterly mindless pig ignorant drivel with a personal desktop
system which has adequate backup to protect against the very
real risks of theft of the system, fire, flood etc.

Just as true of other much more viable
approaches to real backup of a system like that.

You dont need RAID5 SCSI to be able to do
that, you pathetic excuse for a bullshit artist.

Just as true of other approaches than RAID5
SCSI, you pathetic excuse for a bullshit artist.

Just as true of other approaches than RAID5
SCSI, you pathetic excuse for a bullshit artist.

Mindlessly silly. All she has to do is have adequate backup
to protect against the very real risks of theft of the system,
fire, flood etc. Once that essential is in place, only a fool
bothers with 'a personal Cost Benefit Analysis' with RAID5
SCSI with a system and application like that.

AND even if the OP was that stupid, that would STILL
result in the RAID5 SCSI approach being binned.

RAID5 SCSI doesnt do a damned thing about the
very real risks of theft of the system, fire, flood etc.

Pity RAID5 SCSI doesnt do a damned thing about the
very real risks of theft of the system, fire, flood etc.

Duh. Pity the RAID5 SCSI you suggested doesnt qualify.
And is stupid if she does have a reliable backup mechanism.

Another terminally stupid approach
for real backup of a system like that.

Wota pity that RAID5 SCSI doesnt protect against the
very real risks of theft of the system, fire, flood etc.

Wota pity that RAID5 SCSI doesnt protect against the
very real risks of theft of the system, fire, flood etc.

And if the system gets stolen, the house or room burns
down, the house gets flooded, she's fucked, you fool.

Only a fool uses AIT tapes in that particular situation.

Tho that would at least provide adequate protection
against the very real risks of theft of the system,
fire, flood etc. RAID5 SCSI doesnt.

Wrong. As always. All the drivel above is just that, pig ignorant drivel.

Your problem, you pathetic excuse for a bullshit artist.

You've just lied instead.

None, zero, nada, ziltch if she has adequate backup to protect
against the very real risks of theft of the system, fire, flood etc.

True in spades if RAID5 SCSI is used and the entire system
gets stolen, the house burns down or gets flooded, etc etc etc.

Anyone with a clue has adequate backup to protect against
the very real risks of theft of the system, fire, flood etc.

Wota pity that RAID5 SCSI is useless with those very real risks.

Even you should be able to bullshit you way out of your
predicament better than that pathetic effort, Lipman.

And you're doing precisely what you howl about anyway,
you pathetic excuse for a bullshit artist/flagrant hypocrite.

Yep, fine by me. That might be why I use my real name, fool.

You come off as a pathetic excuse for
a bullshit artist and flagrant hypocrite, child.

No one ever said it was, you pathetic excuse for a bullshit artist.

Pigs arse it is. Its a very average system today.

All completely and utterly irrelevant to what was actually being
discussed, what makes sense in a system like that today.

Guess which pathetic little posturing bullshit artist has
just made a VERY spectacular fool of itself, yet again ?

I've been doing it since before you were even born thanks, child.

Guess which pathetic little posturing bullshit artist has
just made a VERY spectacular fool of itself, yet again ?

Pigs arse they do. They just piss themselve laughing
at the spectacular fool you make of yourself and
make snide remarks about you behind your back.

A fart in the bath, child. Some of us have been doing
that since before you were even born thanks, child.

Great, there is only so much posturing anyone can take.

Just another of your pathetic little drug crazed fantasys, child.

And only the fools will be stupid enough to rely
on RAID5 SCSI to protect themselves against
all risks to the data they cant readily replace.

Anyone with a clue will protect themselves against the
very real risks of theft of the system, fire, flood etc and
when they do that, wont need RAID5 SCSI with a personal
desktop system which doesnt need very high availability.

Wota fucking wanker. Only a fucking wanker puts Mr. on the front his name today.

 

And hasnt even managed to grasp that RAID5 SCSI is useless
against the very real risks of theft of the system, fire, flood etc.

So do I |-)

 

Would agree with that, but wonder why you seem to think SCSI
is a necessity??? I tend to think SCSI is over-rated, IDE
RAID does the job without any probs and is much cheaper.

 

Doesn't the architecture of IDE stop more than one access at a time?
With SCSI you can access multiple devices simultaneously; which is of
huge benefit in the enterprise.

If IDE was as good as you say, you'd see people snapping up IDE HDDs for
enterprise use as opposed to SCSI HDDs.

 

If you are in a corporate environment and have a production
server running you can afford to double the cost for that
not-even-close-to-doubled increase in performance (and
probably should if the server will be heavily utilised, we
do), the person posing the question is talking about a home
system however from memory. Unless shitloads of people are
going to be connecting to his system as a file server or for
other hard drive intensive reasons he really wont get a cost
effective benefit, especially with SATA.

 

And still pay much more in total than when using IDE
mirroring on the motherboard or mirroring in the OS.

Mindless, as always.

Not a fucking clue. Particularly with the scenario being
discussed, just keeping photos. **** all overhead when a new
photo isnt added very often enough to matter and it always
takes some time to get new photos into the system anyway.

And you MUST have more than any form of RAID or mirroring to
protect against the real risks of system theft, fire or flood etc anyway.

The only thing that makes any sense currently is to write
new photos to multiple DVDs once they have been edited
etc and keep at least one of the copys offsite.

While superficially the time to write to DVDs isnt trivial,
its actually a small part of the total time involved with a
new photo with everything from taking the photo, getting
it into the PC, editing it, saving it to multiple DVDs etc.

Pity RAID5 SCSI doesnt qualify because it does NOT protect
against the very real risks of system theft, fire or flood etc.

More utterly mindless silly stuff.

Wank your way in either direction in your case. Mindlessly wank in fact.

More fool you when it does NOT protect against
the very real risks of system theft, fire or flood etc.

Only for fools like you that aint gotta
clue about what real backup is about.

The only thing that makes any sense at all is to ensure
that there is real protection against the very real risks
of system theft, fire or flood etc and THEN consider if
there is the cost of any form of mirroring is justified at all.

If the OP decides that in the unlikely event of the death
of the new drive, that what photos need to be back on the
replacement from the DVD backups need to be available
quickly, mirroring may be justified, at twice the price.

You aint even established any need for the high availability
that RAID5 brings with it with a personal desktop system.
Mirroring may well be all thats actually needed if any
duplication is required at all with real backup in place.

A completely irrelevant number with a personal desktop system.

Another lie. They're in the product manuals, stupid.

Because MTBFs are completely useless, fool.

Another lie. Try 600K, liar.

Not a fucking clue.

A size thats completely useless for the OP.

The size has actually been selected to make SCSI
look better, you pathetic excuse for a bullshit artist.

Pity that the real comparison between a single ATA 250GB
drive and SCSI RAID5 total price of the same capacity is
nothing like your flagrantly dishonest comparison.

And when the RAID5 SCSI will still need the same backup
approach to protect against the very real risks of system
theft, fire or flood etc, you cant get away with claiming that
RAID5 SCSI gives more protection for the MUCH higher price.

The ONLY thing it gives is higher availability and that is very
unlikely to be justifiable with a personal desktop system.

MUCH more expensive in fact when the correct comparison is done.

The real drive should have been
Maxtor DiamondMax 16, 250GB Hard Drive
CDW Price $267.47

Pity you completely ignored the cost of the RAID5
SCSI hardware. Thats gunna be free from the
fairys at the bottom of the garden or Santa eh ?

And since you will need 5 of those, thats $2,050 for the drives alone.
And you'll need to add the cost of the RAID5 SCSI to that.

Hang on, thats OVER TEN TIMES THE COST
OF THE ONLY SENSIBLE APPROACH.

Game, set and match, I believe.

 

You have no experience to back that statement, it shows.

I have 7 servers with dual 100gb drives in them, all are IDE, all run at
least a dozen web sites (asp.net ones) and several FTP sites. The drives
are mirrored using Windows 2000 software mirror. All drives are setup
with 6GB for the first partition, and the remainder for the second
partition.

The servers take about 30,000 hits per day and never show any bottle
neck at the drive layer (using perfmon) and since they are dual P3 or
dual Celeron (old 500mhz ones) systems, they perform almost as well as
my single P4 system does.

You need to actually experience this stuff before you start talking out
the left side of your mouth.

Oh, one other thing, the RX6000 RAID IDE Card screams with 128MB of ram
and 6 drives configured as all RAID 5.

 

Imagine how Apache would do with those specs... *g*

 

Imagine IF Apache could run asp.net with full MS SQL connections

I have Apache servers, use Software Raid 1 on IDE drives too

I also have UW controllers for other systems and just don't really see
the difference in performance until both CPU's are loaded to 80+% under
a sustained (30 second) run. Even then, it's not a bottle neck in the
drives, its in the CPU's and threads (which is a code issue some times).

 

Your common sense failed this time.
With a SCSI ALL disks can read or write at the same time.
That is one of the strengths of scsi

Of course, at home you will have trouble using this strength.

 

I'm not really a fan of .NET. I've used it to make a couple of web apps
that are used but I don't know, I don't really like it for some reason.

I do remember liking the stateful connections (i.e. how it remembered
what you'd selected for all dropdowns/radio buttons etc). I prefer the
ASP/PHP approach though it's not quite as useful when interfacing with
other applications (i.e. through COM, for instance).

Have been mucking around with Apache the last couple of months at home
and really like it.

 

Nope. You can only read or write from a single drive at one time.

Wrong again, particularly with RAID.

 

It isnt, he's got that completely wrong.

He's got it completely wrong. You have it right.

 

Me

Well, I have tried to understand HOW, how is posibile for multiple devices
to send electrical signals on the same wire in the same time.. How is this
possible form the electrical point of view?

With separate channels you have separate buses, separate electrical paths;
the data of the stripe is rebuilt in the controller's logic but essentialy
the logical path is 6 times wider.

I am not trying my skills in retorics, I am just trying to understand..

Thanks

Cristian Croitoru

 

Yes, but so does SCSI.

With IDE you have more than one bus and those can certainly
be used simultaneously. Some of the IDE RAID controllers
actually have a separate ATA bus for each device. SCSI doesnt.

Nope. You cant read and write on more than one device per bus.

What you actually have with SCSI is the possibility of
telling one drive to move to a particular track and then
using the bus with another drive while it does that.

It isnt as big a benefit as you might think and is nothing like
whats possible with IDE with a separate bus per drive.

Plenty do just that.

And plenty of just mindlessly tool along using SCSI.

 

Yes, I understand, and I did not explain myself very well at all.

Let me say that all drives on a controller can be reading and writing at the
same time, this does not mean that they are holding onto the buss at that time.

Buss speed 160Mb/s, drive speed 20Mb/s therefore 8 devices r/w at the same
time.

All drives have buffers (double buffers actually), when a buffer is full, the
drive raises a flag (data available) to say he wants to transfer some data, when
the buss is free there will be a buss available signal.

In effect we have a multiplexed system happening here, unlike an IDE device
which holds the buss for the complete transfer.

I hope that sounds better.

Derek

 

You mangled the story completely, and are still doing that.

Utterly mangled all over again. You cant even have
two drives simulaneosly reading at the same time.

Wrong. It aint at the same time. Only one drive
can be transferring data at any particular time.

Just as true with IDE.

Thats what ANY bus is.

Utterly mangled all over again.

You've mangling the entirely separate issues of say a
read request being issued, and the drive having to move
the heads to get the data, and hanging onto the bus while
that happens, with the entirely separate question of being
able to read and write simultaneously.

Nope, its still completely mangled.

And as far as the original is concerned, IDE with a separate
bus per drive will ALWAYS be able to do much better than
SCSI with a single bus for all the drives.

 

The limitation has nothing to do with the partition size, it is drive size.
As you mention, the A04 or above BIOS is required, but I can attest
personally that with the current BIOS and XP Pro SP1, the 4550 with support
both the 250GB drive AND partitions over 137GB.

Tom

 

You cannot accomplish that in a Dimension 4550. There are not 5 spots for
drives NOR enough power supply. You could also not do it for the same price
as the pair of 250GB drives.

You are making suggestions that make no sense for the 4550.

I could probably get an IBM Shark array to work too, for a couple hundred
thousand.

I also did not clarify my comment. I do not use active, full time mirror. I
should have said automated backup software. I happen to use Iomega's
QuikSync which is 'near real time' and has trivial overhead.

You are providing no value to the original poster with suggestions that are
not appropriate for her configuration.

Tom