Matthew Dillon wrote:
I don't agree re: SCSI RAID. It used to be true that SCSI was
superior not just in the reliability of the bus protocol but also
in the actual hardware. I remember back in the day when seagate
waxed poetic about all the work they did to make their SCSI drives
more robust, and I gladly paid for SCSI drives.
Well, having worked for Seagate, maybe I'm just spouting their KoolAid
here. :-) But the production quality of the components which went into
SCSI drives far exceeded those for the ATA line (which was extremely
cost-sensitive compared to the SCSI line).
I'm not saying *you* should consider SCSI... just that if you're running
something which requires serious uptime (as in it's unacceptable to have
more than a second of downtime per year), you're pretty much looking at
SCSI. Actually, you're pretty much looking at an EMC box or somesuch,
which will use SCSI only. And having an EMC apps engineer on call 24/7.
It's simple statistics: if you need 99.999% uptime, then your components
have to be much better, and you're going to pay a pretty penny for even
marginal improvements. (On the flip side, most people who say they need
99.999% uptime suddenly don't when they find out just how expensive it
is. :-)
SATA is clearly just as reliable a bus protocol.
Yes and no. ATA's protocol is reliable (even though the signalling
sucks)... it's more that the chipset vendors (mostly) play fast and
loose with the rules. (I've been extremely disappointed by the
deteriorating quality of chipsets and flagrant lack of testing.)
I've already seen one SATA setup go completely unreliable thanks to a
chipset which had a tendency to freeze the north bus when attached to an
NCQ SATA drive.
Also, modern drives have far
fewer moving parts and far smaller (and fewer) heads,
Smaller isn't necessarily better. Smaller sliders (the black thing you
can actually see) *are* good, because when they hit the disk (and they
will, even on a disk which appears to be operating at 100%) it means
less mass, less momentum, less debris. The head itself, though, is also
smaller, which is bad -- it takes less to start eroding away the GMR stripe.
I don't think there is that much of a difference in the number of moving
parts -- in fact, IBM added more a few years back when they started
doing load/unload of the head off the platters during power down. (I
think, but am not sure, that this has been pretty much replaced with
laser texturing a zone on the platters so you can park the head there.)
> and its hard
to differentiate the robustness for commercial vs consumer models
by using (e.g.) more robust materials because of that.
Keep in mind that some fancy, new robust materials end up not working
out so well. Generally, the newest technology goes to laptop drives
first (where it's all about trying to squeeze as much as possible on
those 2.5" platters), then to consumer desktops, then (once it's proven)
to the enterprise lines.
Software raid is a fine solution as long as your computer doesn't
crash and as long as you have the extra cpu and bandwidth to spare.
i.e. it can handle drive faults just fine, but it isn't so good handling
operating system faults or power failures due to the lack of
battery-backed cache, and it costs a lot of extra cpu to do something
like RAID-5 in software.
Never had a crash with Vinum on FreeBSD 4.x; on Linux, it will rebuild
the RAID array in the background after a crash. (It's slow, but if you
have the CPU to spare, you can probably afford to let it run overnight
like me).
All the above in mind, when I finish configuring my new server, it'll
use the exact setup you're describing: 3Ware SATA RAID. (My old server
got zapped due to a direct lightning hit to my old house days before we
left... need to get into the new place before I get everything out of
storage...)