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

David H. Lipman wrote in
message ...

Using RAID 5, I can use 5 x 80GB drives and
get 320GB instead of buying two 250GB drives.

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

As for use of mirroring software, never.

Mindless, as always.

Too much overhead *always* use hardware based RAID solutions.

Not a ****ing 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.

In addition, you suggest the best solution

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

and work you way down not the worst solutuion

More utterly mindless silly stuff.

and work your way up.

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

That is why I start at RAID 5 SCSI.

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

That's the starting point

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

and the OP can go down the list.

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.

And as also stated there is RAID 5 SATA.

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.

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

A completely irrelevant number with a personal desktop system.

I looked at SATA and Ultra ATA drives. They
don't even list the MTBF value for these drives.

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

Why ?

Because MTBFs are completely useless, fool.

because they have a much lower MTBF maybe 80K hours at best.

Another lie. Try 600K, liar.

Meaning, they have a higher failure rate.

Not a ****ing clue.

Below are three drives; SATA Ultra ATA and SCSI all approx 80GB.

A size thats completely useless for the OP.

The drives have been selected to be similar to level the playing field.

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

However, the SCSI drive in all aspects beats
the SATA and Ultra ATA except in price.

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.

The SCSI is more expensive.

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

rice comparisons done at http://www.cdw.com/

SATA drive
Model Number:ST380013AS
CDW Price $119.85

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 ?

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

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.

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


"Tom Scales" wrote in message
...
| 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
|

On Sat, 6 Dec 2003 09:16:58 +1000, "Cristian Croitoru"
wrote:

Speaking of speed and not being particularly familiar with the SCSI
protocol, my common sense tells me that having a stripe on a IDE
multichannel controller can push the speed quite some way..
Again my common sense tells me that a SCSI controller can not stream data
from more than one drive at a time, as only one drive can put data on the
bus at the same time

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.

derek / nul wrote in message
...
Cristian Croitoru wrote

Speaking of speed and not being particularly familiar with the SCSI
protocol, my common sense tells me that having a stripe on a IDE
multichannel controller can push the speed quite some way..

Again my common sense tells me that a SCSI controller
can not stream data from more than one drive at a time,
as only one drive can put data on the bus at the same time

Your common sense failed this time.

Nope.

With a SCSI ALL disks can read or write at the same time.

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

That is one of the strengths of scsi

Nope.

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

Wrong again, particularly with RAID.

"Cristian Croitoru" wrote in message ...
Me
Speaking of speed and not being particularly familiar with the SCSI
protocol, my common sense tells me that having a stripe on a IDE
multichannel controller can push the speed quite some way..
Again my common sense tells me that a SCSI controller can not stream data
from more than one drive at a time, as only one drive can put data on the
bus at the same time
"derek:
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.

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?

It isnt, he's got that completely wrong.

With separate channels you have separate
buses, separate electrical paths;

Correct.

the data of the stripe is rebuilt in the controller's
logic but essentialy the logical path is 6 times wider.

Correct.

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

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

Me
Speaking of speed and not being particularly familiar with the SCSI
protocol, my common sense tells me that having a stripe on a IDE
multichannel controller can push the speed quite some way..
Again my common sense tells me that a SCSI controller can not stream data
from more than one drive at a time, as only one drive can put data on the
bus at the same time
"derek:
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.

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

"Codswallop" wrote in message .. .
On Sat, 06 Dec 2003 04:06:02 GMT, Hunter1 wrote in aus.computers:

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?

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.

With SCSI you can access multiple devices simultaneously;

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.

which is of huge benefit in the enterprise.

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

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

Plenty do just that.

And plenty of just mindlessly tool along using SCSI.

On Sat, 6 Dec 2003 16:30:46 +1000, "Cristian Croitoru"
wrote:

Me
Speaking of speed and not being particularly familiar with the SCSI
protocol, my common sense tells me that having a stripe on a IDE
multichannel controller can push the speed quite some way..
Again my common sense tells me that a SCSI controller can not stream data
from more than one drive at a time, as only one drive can put data on the
bus at the same time
"derek:
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.

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..

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

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
"Kernelpanic" wrote in message
. net...

"Suzeann Loomis" wrote in message
...

Help, please.

I have been told that I can only add another 120 gigabyte hard drive
to my Dell 4550. But people at a local computer shop say I can add a
250 gigabyte hard drive.

Which is true? I need more space for my photography.

Thank you.

Suze Loomis

Suze,

I read all the post, from which alot of it got off the subject that you
had
posted. Did you try and contact Dell? If you have support for you
system,
I suggest you contact Dell, even though there may be those that will
oppose
it. Please post the firmware rev that you BIOS is using(Rev. A04 added
"UDMA support for 48-bit LBA hard drives over 137GB"), and what OS you are
running on the system(i.e., WinXP Home, WinXP Pro SP1, etc...). You
should
be able to install a 250GB HD in your system, but it may depend on your OS
and BIOS firmware for how big a partition can be. The new HD may come
with
a utility to help you partition your HD. If adding the drive as a 2nd
drive, your problem may be simply that you can't create a partition
greater
then 120GB(Actually it's slightly larger), but you can create a few
partitions on that new HD. I also hope that you are backing up your
files.

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
"David H. Lipman" wrote in message
...
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

"Tom Scales" wrote in message
...
| 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
|

On Sat, 06 Dec 2003 05:00:30 GMT, Leythos wrote:

In article ,
says...
As for use of mirroring software, never. Too much overhead *always*
use hardware based RAID solutions.

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)

I would not expect any bottlenecks at 1 hit every 3 seconds, any IDE could
handle that.
SCSI comes in handy at 30 hits per second