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Old July 28th 03, 09:41 AM
Tod
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"Jonathan Sachs" wrote in message
...
"Tod" wrote:

A "Quality" high end SCSI hard drive will last longer
under long term disk-intenive (24 hour a day) work.
But you are paying a lot more money.


The drives will be spinning all the time, but since this is a
workstation, they will not be seeking all the time. When I mentioned
"disk-intensive applications," I was thinking of my need for
performance during short periods of high activity, not the effects of
disk activity on the drives.

It never occurred to me that pounding the disk would actually wear it
out. I'm accustomed to thinking that drive life is dependent on
power-up time and the operating environment, and on power-up/down
cycles. Am I being too simplistic?


So you are just doing normal disk activity.
I think most people would agree that heat is the drive killer.

I would get a motherboard with the built-in Raid controller (only about

$20
more).
Put the ATA/EIDE Boot hard drive on the Raid controller.


An interesting possibility, which I hadn't considered. It brings a
couple of questions to mind.

First, will I pay a performance penalty? I investigated RAID several
years ago, and learned that there was a substantial performance
penalty. Even with RAID 0 there was a penalty if the drives were not
synchronized (and IDE drives did not have the hardware necessary to do
that).


A 7200RPM ATA/EIDE will have close to the same performance
as a SCSI 7200 drive
Invest in a fast processor and lots of memory.

Second, what about noise, heat, and space requirements? This would
increase the number of drives in my system from 2 to 4, presumably
doubling all of those factors. Might I not find four IDE drives to be
nearly as noisy as two SCSI drives, or even noisier?


My mail address is jsachs177 at earthlink dot net.