Jim Lawrence
accessd at shaw.ca
Mon Jun 4 13:13:13 CDT 2007
Hi John: Can you not just use the SATA controller off the motherboard? All the new boards (GigaByte) come with at least 2 SATA connections. I have hooked up a 5 drive array off one connection and striped them and then added another 2 off the second connection for the OS drives, for a client. The mother board minus the RAM came to $276.00CAN, 1.7GHz, LAN card, Video Card and Sound Card built in plus RAID software. The performance, though not stellar is quite acceptable. That is a good price for the drives though. Jim -----Original Message----- From: dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of jwcolby Sent: Sunday, June 03, 2007 8:06 PM To: 'Discussion of Hardware and Software issues' Subject: Re: [dba-Tech] Petulant PC Arthur, Just go for it. For about $500 you can get a dedicated raid controller that will handle 8 SATA 2 hard drives. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816131004 You can now purchase 750g hard drives for ~$240. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148134 So for somewhere in the neighborhood of $750 you have the start of a kickass raid system. That is EXPANDABLE. Now add two more of these same drives in a few months. Dedicate one to the RAID5 redundancy, and another to data storage. Now any disk can fail without endangering your data. A few months later add another, and another and another. Eventually dedicate another drive to raid 6. You now have a raid array where any TWO disks can fail without endangering your data. You can end up with 6 x 700 (real) or 4.2 terabytes of raid 6 storage. That should handle your issues with saving your backed up images for quite awhile I would think. BTW, that controller card is wicked fast, real life read data streaming of >400 mbyte / second when fully implemented. Reads can stream data off of all available drives so the read speed is cumulative, as you add more disks, the streaming read rises. Writes OTOH are at slightly less than a single drive. This kind of performance is great for a data warehouse kind of system where data rarely changes. I have two of these systems. One has 8x 320 drives (300 real) in Raid 6 with 6 of those drives actually available for storage. I went with 320s for the first set because at that time (about a year ago) that was the sweet spot. The second one I am still building out. It currently has 6x 500gb drives (~470 real) in raid 5 with 5 drives available for storage, and when I add the final two drives one will go to raid 6 and the other for storage so I will have 6 x 470g of storage. ATM 500g is the sweet spot, but the 750g drives are dropping like a rock so they will hit the sweet spot within a few months I think. The second system I actually built from the ground up using the raid controller such that it actually boots off the raid, with a 200 gb partition for the boot disk. The rest of the space is available for storage This fall I will probably build a system with two quad core processors on a single motherboard, and for that system I will build out a raid system around the 750gb disks, booting off the raid array like I do with the second system I built. Yes, I know that it is not cheap to get in to, but the redundancy is great peace of mind, and it is expandable so that you can do it a piece at a time. The nice thing about a dedicated controller is that it is portable. If the system fails, the whole shootin match can just be dropped into another system. With a raid based on a motherboard, this won't work unless you get another of the exact same board. John W. Colby Colby Consulting www.ColbyConsulting.com -----Original Message----- From: dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Arthur Fuller Sent: Sunday, June 03, 2007 4:40 PM To: Discussion of Hardware and Software issues Subject: Re: [dba-Tech] Petulant PC The following is no help at all to your current situation, but since you have used Ghost for a while, and I never have, even though I had it included in a previous version of Norton, I thought I would ask: Let's say your current boot drive has 250GB capacity and 150GB is occupied when you Ghost. How big is the Ghost file? Do you need another HD upon which to plant said file? The reason I ask is this: a bare-bones installation already comes with my HP computer. (This is achieved by partititioning the HD, creating a read-only partition with the initial image on it, then allowing you to start over anytme by re-initializing drive c: from the r-o drive d:. However, even though I love this ability, it still means after re-initializing I have to spend the better part of a day reinstalling Office, Office Developer, SP1...n, NoteTab, winRAR, VS.NET, SQL 2005 and so on. So even though I can reinit the original, I still lose a day implanting the rest. So let's assume that the total install that satisfies me is > 50% of the disk. Does Ghost compress it? Even if it does, I think there is no alternative but a pair of disks of whatever size in the machine of interest. Ok. Given that if I'm talking about a box with a 500GB disk, therefore I need a pair, in fact three (the third on another box, so I can copy the Ghost file to safety). This sounds: a) like a recursive problem; b) reminiscent of the days of FastBack, when I needed 50 3.5 disks to back up my HD (currently the number of dual-layer DVDs is smaller, let's see 250GB / 4.7 GB = 50 + single-layer DVDs. That assumes the drive is full. I never let a drive get even 50% before I think it's time for another. Fortunately prices plummet in relatively direct proportion with my compulsive need to install more software and create new data. Either way, it seems that backup has been momentarily possible and then suddenly impossible, then possible, then impossible, then possible, then impossible (repeat until exhausted). Hofstadter, so to speak. Even the alleged massive storage of Blue-Ray apparently leaves us in the FastBack situation of multiple disks. 200GB to back up, 50GB on a Blue-Ray. Back in the FastBack situation. If disk 3 has a problem, I have a BIG problem. A. _______________________________________________ dba-Tech mailing list dba-Tech at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/dba-tech Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com