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#61
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#62
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#63
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In article ,
Alfred Falk wrote: Why do you need long cables? As the other posters here say over and over: it's obvious you don't have much experience. Longer cables so you can reach further in large installations. Farther to where? The next floor? When do you ever use these jumpers? Perhaps when you have more than one device on a bus? When do you have just one device on a bus? I agree that it should be this way and everybody runs around telling people it's true--you are telling us---and it makes sense and that it probably *has been* true in the past. But today, things apparently have changed. Moving parts are as robust if not more so than the electronics. What evidence do you have that this is changed? I certainly don't see any in my workplace. Actually, I'm not really sure it has changed. It could just be the idea the high rate of power supply, fan and drive failures has always been a myth. Perhaps we should consider applying RAID to motherboards, CPUs and memory. Redundant systems are common in the high-end world. Perhaps because motherboards, CPUs and memory fail so frequently. |
#64
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In article ,
Curious George wrote: Let's see the data. Let's see you listen. The basis of such an observation has been repeated ad nauseum. Let's see you test both. I am asking for the observations. I don't see how it's more flexible. In fact, it's less flexible. SCSI has to deal ID numbers and termination. This is irrelevant to SATA. SATA also has slim cables. Longer cable lengths, Why do you need long cables? As the other posters here say over and over: it's obvious you don't have much experience. Longer cables so you can reach further in large installations. Right. For convenient, external, modular DAS So are they are on the next floor. boxes. Controllers tend to be better. What does that mean exactly? numbers & termination are far from complicated. Most sata doesn't allow remote or delay start and led comes from the controller instead of the drive. Is that really the case? Figures you don't know I know it isn't the case. not just raid management but disk diagnostics & disk tuning. That's something that RAID has always been missing. Also think of what a bitch it is to combine 50 spindles in a single, quality built DAS array. With scsi that's a breeze. On a FCAL SAN that's nothing as well. So it is the case with SATA. Since I'm sure you've only seen Dimensions then yes. By in large Dells are nothing to get a hardon over. They are just computers like any other. Actually, Dell has automatic onsite techs, so it behooves them to make a reliable box. Redundant systems are common in the high-end world. It just shows his point of reference But it does seem to suggest that they are just like other computers, prone to electronic failures. |
#66
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flux writes:
I'm describing ordinary desktops. Aha. Everyone else is describing high volume storage servers, not desktops. |
#67
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On Fri, 15 Apr 2005 04:46:01 GMT, flux wrote:
They are just computers like any other. Wow if only I knew this sooner! My company & I would have saved all this money on eMachines, or Acers or maybe some really old Packard Bells! From now on I'm just going to find the cheapest pee cee I can find! With some extra ATA disks I could make a datacenter! The base models will be fine for every thing I want to do and every file that is important to me (you know like maps & cheat codes). All I need now is a kit for a windows & a neon light! No wait, they sell those already done. Kewl! |
#68
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In article ,
flux wrote: In article , Alfred Falk wrote: Why do you need long cables? As the other posters here say over and over: it's obvious you don't have much experience. Longer cables so you can reach further in large installations. Farther to where? The next floor? The smallest computer room of mine in the last 8 or so years had 6 racks worth of equipment. The largest has maybe 40 or 50 racks (I haven't counted, since it is shared with a few other people, I know which racks are mine). This doesn't count a large computer room where I was only in charge of a small part (my part was 4 racks, but the whole room must have had several hundred racks worth, as big as 2 football fields; rumor has it that it had over 3000 servers in it). Try connecting a few hundred disks in 4 or 5 racks with SATA cables. It is completely insane. Then try to do the same thing with FC (using a mix of fabric and FC-AL, to reduce the number of expensive brocade's that a necessary). Now it is a heck of a lot of work, but doable. Now try to do the same thing with little clusters: A handful RAID servers, each with a half dozen JBODs connected via SCSI or FC-AL, and then interconnected via gigE to a central network hub that connects via 10gigE to the backbone. Now it is actually doable (even then just the wiring took us several days). Even with such an installation (where the disks are within 2 feet of their attachment point), SATA wouldn'y work, because every RAID server is connected to about 40 disks, and you can't in practice connect 40 SATA cables to a single box, whereas it is easy to connect 3 or 4 FC or USCSI cables. Again, you might think that SATA cables are easy to work with because they are small, flexible, and have convenient little connectors. That's true - compared to PATA or to 50-pin SCSI. In the world of large systems, compare that to FC with SFF connectors (these are the 2-strand optical cables with connectors that look a little like modular plugs, with two optical interfaces sticking out the front): The FC cables are much smaller than SATA cables, are more flexible, and take much better to being bundled by the dozen. The SFF connector is a little smaller than the SATA connector, and it locks solidly (which means the connections will stay put if someone jiggles the cable bundle when doing maintenance). In a moderate size computer room (many hundreds of disks, dozens or low hundreds of servers, with RAID controllers in between), you need a heck of a lot of 5m and 25m (15 foot and 75 foot) cables, just to reach stuff within the room. A 2m = 6 foot cable is usually good only within a rack, and if you are really lucky, it can interconnect two neighboring racks through the hollow floor or in the overhead tray (but only if the thing being connected is near the bottom or the top of the rack). SATA is just out for this kind of interconnect. I'm sorry to harp on this point, but SATA is ONLY a useful technology for connecting disks within a box, or between a box and an extension cabinet that's right next to a box. SATA is no longer useful in practice once the installation reaches the size of multiple racks. But as a replacement for PATA, for computers or RAID servers with between 1 and 4 disks, it is an excellent improvement (which is why I have a computer with internal SATA and two external SATA ports next to my desk, but not in the computer room). -- The address in the header is invalid for obvious reasons. Please reconstruct the address from the information below (look for _). Ralph Becker-Szendy |
#69
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#70
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In article ,
Paul Rubin wrote: flux writes: I'm describing ordinary desktops. Aha. Everyone else is describing high volume storage servers, not desktops. Which by everyone's description are just as prone to failure. Otherwise, why would one have redundant components? |
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