On Tue, 13 Jan 2004, Nick Reinking wrote:
Also, it should be noted that if we want to extend the usefulness of current machines, there are some 10K Western Digital IDE drives (basically SCSI drives with an IDE interface). They have an average read access time of 8.3ms (the WD740GD does, at least), and is $260 from Newegg for the same size (74GB). It also has a built-in PATA-to-SATA bridge, so it supports hot-swapping and command queueing.
Indeed. Those drives are "bastard stepchildren"... it's a SCSI servo with IDE controller electronics tied to a SATA bus via a built-in bridge. It's a f'ing IDE drive. Stay away from it. If you want SATA (read: something cheaper than SCSI), buy real, native SATA drives which only Seagate are currently making. (which exact models, I don't know.)
Haven't we already had the "cheap is not the goal" mini-flame? If you want fast and reliable, it's gonna take some green. If you want cheap, it'll be less reliable and slow. I would personally recommend a FC array deployed under LVM2 with XFS riding on top. The array is physically expandable to 127 drives. And the drives are really fast, esp. when you have 100 of them in parallel :-)
--Ricky