On Tue, Aug 12, 2003 at 01:56:19PM -0700, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Brion Vibber wrote:
(eg, the Altus 130 or 140, with the max of 4 gig
ram)
Altus 130 is Dual Channel ATA-100, (2 drive bays)
Altus 140 is U160 SCSI (3 drive bays)
I have *always* used SCSI for servers, but is this just superstition?
I'm narrowing it down to these three:
Altus 130
Dual Athlon 2800+, 4 gig DDR, 2 80 gig EIDE drives
$3006
Altus 140
Dual Athlon 2800+, 4 gig DDR, 2 36 gig SCSI drives
$3590
Altus 1000
Dual Opteron 240 (sweet!), 4 gig DDR, 2 80 gig EIDE drives
$3526
As you can see, within the budget range of potential tradeoffs, it
looks like SCSI costs $500 more for half the disk space.
No, it isn't superstition if you want to have good, reliable, fast RAID
on a server. There are IDE solutions out there but the vast majority of
them, well, suck. If you are willing to spend more than your $3000
target, it might be wised to get the 1000E w/ 4GB (4x1GB) + 2x 120GB IDE
disks (these are newer disks than the 80GB). That gives us considerable
upgrade potential in the future (as AMD phases out Athlon MPs), as well
as allowing us to move up to 8GB of memory in the future. If worse
comes to worse, you can always add a PCI SCSI card and gets some
external SCSI storage in the future.
Or, if you're willing to mess around, go to a single 40GB IDE disk on
the 1000E and buy a couple of Western Digital 10k RPM Raptor hard drives
from another vendor. They are SCSI size (36GB), SCSI speed (10k RPM),
but for a lot lower price (only $136 at
newegg.com); which is almost as
cheap as the much slower, older disks from Penguin Computing.
--
Nick Reinking -- eschewing obfuscation since 1981 -- Minneapolis, MN