Hosting again

[Simon Burr]

On Thu, Nov 01, 2007 at 03:47:33PM +0000, Dirk Koopman wrote:
>IIRC the results were:  software raid in SCSI nearly 5 times as fast, 
>ditto IDE 2.5 times as fast as the adaptec doing its hardware raid 0.

For RAID0, RAID1 or combinations of these I'd use software RAID; after all
its just data shuffling when it comes down to it.

However for RAID5 or RAID6 I'd always go for hardware RAID; perferably with
battery-backed cache. In reality going for an external array tends to be the
better thing to do here. So long as you get decent ones which don't do
things like:
 o Reseting their SCSI bus randomly
 o Decide that hotswap controllers doesn't actually really mean that
 o Burst into flames

The other option is the SunFire X4500 server running Solaris and ZFS. 24Tb of
disk in 4U is fairly good; you'll loose a bit to RAIDZ and moreso if you use
the mirrored version.

[1] http://www.sun.com/servers/x64/x4500/specs.xml

-- 
   Simon the stressed        http://www.bpfh.net/           simes at bpfh.net
                 Chocolate is *not* a substitute for sleep