IDE RAID Examined 597
Bender writes "The Tech Report has an interesting article comparing IDE RAID controllers from four of the top manufacturers. The article serves as more than just a straight product comparison, because the author has included tests for different RAID levels and different numbers of drives, plus a comprehensive series of benchmarks intended to isolate the performance quirks of each RAID controller card at each RAID level. The results raise questions about whether IDE RAID can really take the place of a more expensive SCSI storage subsystem in workstation or small-scale server environments. Worthwhile reading for the curious sysadmin." I personally would love to hear any ide-raid stories that slashdotters might have.
IN SOVIET RUSSIA (Score:-1, Funny)
IDE AID? (Score:1, Funny)
at the company I work for (Score:5, Funny)
A little story (Score:4, Funny)
You asked for it... (Score:4, Funny)
Once upon a time, in an array far, far away, there lived a young princess who was worried about the integrity of her data...
Great article (Score:3, Funny)
My favourite quote from the article : As an added bonus, the lights sometimes flash in a side-to-side in a pattern reminiscent of Knight Rider's KITT.
Annoying (Score:5, Funny)
Re:A little story (Score:2, Funny)
Re:A little story (Score:2, Funny)
You had me at "office managers son"
</tears>
Re:You asked for it... (Score:3, Funny)
Redundant Array of Inexpensive Droids.
Re:SCSI for workstations? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:You asked for it... (Score:4, Funny)
She knew that elephants never forget, but they do tend to die after a while, so she hired a consultant to investigate multi-elephant solutions. He came up with RASP - Redundant Array of Short-lived Pachyderms. While SCSI (Smart Chimps Storing Information) is more reliable, elephants were a good solution for more people, because they could also be used for plowing fields.
Oh, come on... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:A little story (Score:5, Funny)
A week after I was hired the computer with the sales database died. I'm the computer guy, so I'm supposed to fix it. I was a bit surprised at what I found (keep in mind this information is supposed to be fairly important information to the company).
The computer had around 256 megs of ram. Was a database server (for sales info) that around 3-4 people were connected to at any given time. Was running WINDOWS 98 using striped IDE hard drives. Among other things that this machine was used for at any given time was graphic editing in Corel Draw (wonderfully stable too I might add), and crash prone MS Office... as well as every God awful freeware screen saver ever found, and many other useless stuff that most people didn't even know what they were supposed to do. Apparently the machine crashed at least 3 times a day, and no one thought there was anything wrong with this.
So one drive dies, and surprise the backup is done on a jazz drive that never worked right. Apparently the girl who used the computer never really read that error message regarding the Jazz drive every morning when she came in. So we had a wonderfully redundant backup with a different Jazz disk for each day of the week with nothing but garbage on all of them.
When I actually put all the pieces of the puzzle together, I just started laughing at how ridiculous the setup was.
Re:A little story (Score:4, Funny)
Find any two-second clip of Nelson saying "Ha Ha!" and email it to fools that destroy things after neglecting your advice. It'd be even better to find a little flash clip of Nelson pointing and laughing, it'd add insult to injury.
Re:Great article (Score:3, Funny)
Like what? "Michael, there are 2 enemies with guns in that room. Please be careful."
Re:IDE Raid, inexpensive but major hassle (Score:2, Funny)
(Sorry couldn't resist)
Ouch (Score:2, Funny)
Re:SCSI for workstations? (Score:3, Funny)
>stiction, and could usually get the drive to come
>back one last time (long enough to make a backup)
>by giving the server a good solid thump in just the
>right spot.
Heh, funny you mention that. At one of my former jobs, we had a very old machine running OS/2 with SCSI drives. This machine was the database bridge between the mainframe and many PC based applications. Anyway, when the machine had to be rebooted/powered down (once in a blue speckled moon) they'd have to pick the machine up and drop it just to get the drives spinning. I kid you not! But it ran forever.
Re:IDE Raid, inexpensive but major hassle (Score:4, Funny)
And that is why fsck is used as a swear word.