View Single Post
  #10  
Old January 3rd 04, 12:08 AM
external usenet poster
 
Posts: n/a
Default


Lets not forget that the Western Digital Raptor drives come with a 5yr
warranty. That say's something about their perceived reliability.


On Wed, 31 Dec 2003 12:37:19 +1300, "Tim" wrote:

Ron,

You can get the answer and that is by running a benchmark, or locating some
benchmarks.

My experience with installing raid 1 on servers is that I am impressed with
their performance, reliability (of the raid mechanism itself - the raid 1 is
self apparent), and ease of setup (Intel ICH5R).

With the Intel ICH5R controller - from experience - it is an absolute
breeze: It does everything as it should. If you get a drive failure, you get
a flashing icon on the task bar (the intel documentation is crappy in the
extreme). Rebuilding a broken array is automatic - just don't delete the
array or fiddle with the config (ever). Notification options are needed:
email is in my view essential, along with Event Log records since a flashing
icon requires you to be at the server to see it (or use terminal server).

I would have no qualms about raid 1 at all. If the performance is not good
enough, then consider the more advanced IDE / SATA raid controllers that are
out. Some include raid 5, cache memory, and increased drive connectivity.
While it is certainly true that raid 1 requires 2 x writes, both writes can
occur at the same time. If both drives are healthy then responses are
received by the controller in close succession, so the elapsed time for a
write is about the same as per a single drive, not twice.

Toms Hardware ran a review on one of these recently and as they do, gave it
their thumbs up.

If the performance is not good enough, but you still need that extra data
assurance, then I would suggest Raptors or SCSI with or without raid. SCSI
drives are substantially more reliable. Ultra 320 SCSI RAID 1 with a caching
controller is brilliant (and a little expensive).

Raid 0 is high risk - the probability of a logical drive failure is
multiplied by the number of drives in the RAID 0. IDE drives seem to be
dropping in reliability, so this is only good for scratch data EG video
editing.






It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word.
-- Andrew Jackson