John W. Colby
jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com
Mon Sep 6 10:14:26 CDT 2004
All of these drives are EXTERNAL drives, connecting via usb or firewire. That simply isn't fast enough. Those are really cool for offline storage, images and such but for a SQL Server database I don't think they would cut the mustard. I have an external 250mb drive from Seagate connected via usb2. It is wicked fast (for external) but it doesn't even come close to drives hooked directly to a motherboard. PLUS the cpu overhead is enormous. Apparently the CPU is involved in pumping the data through the USB port. The USB drive sucks up somewhere around 40% of the CPU cycles when it is reading or writing. I spent a LOT of money on modern motherboards, processors and memory to build a fast server for this thing. The new Nvidia chip for the AMD64 ties 4 SATA ports and 2 IDE ports directly to the "northbridge" (though there is only one chip now) as well as tying the gigabit NIC directly to the chip. It is the fastest thing available at the moment exactly because it has a single massive chip with all these peripherals tied directly to the Athlon64's data bus, and then that chip takes over much of the processing for the data moving in and out of the machine. The only thing on my backplane is a lonely little graphics card. ;-) BELIEVE ME, LaCie is NOT the answer. They are nice drives, just not for a database server. They might do nicely for the database backup though (rubs his bleary eyes thoughtfully...). John W. Colby www.ColbyConsulting.com -----Original Message----- From: dba-sqlserver-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:dba-sqlserver-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Arthur Fuller Sent: Monday, September 06, 2004 10:48 AM To: dba-sqlserver at databaseadvisors.com Subject: RE: [dba-SQLServer] Quotes in data part II Perhaps you should have gone with a pair of 1TB LaCie drives, JC, or two pairs. A long time ago somebody told me, "Always get enough space so the disk is never more than half full. Then you can do anything you want." -----Original Message----- From: dba-sqlserver-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:dba-sqlserver-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of John W. Colby Sent: Monday, September 06, 2004 1:21 AM To: dba-sqlserver at databaseadvisors.com Subject: RE: [dba-SQLServer] Quotes in data part II LOL. I keep talking about 1 g of data. Of course it is turning out to be almost 1 T. John W. Colby www.ColbyConsulting.com _______________________________________________ dba-SQLServer mailing list dba-SQLServer at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/dba-sqlserver http://www.databaseadvisors.com