Slashdot Mirror

"As one could suspect, RAID 1 offers very little in terms of performance."

You took this single quote VASTLY out of context to start with. It is refering to RAID-1 verses RAID-0 and/or single drives. It is NOT refering to RAID-1 relative to RAID-5. It's a mile-high look at RAID.

Let's try some other quotes from that same article, which aren't out-of-context like the ones you provided:

Although not the slowest of the common RAID types, RAID 1 can be slower than a single drive in some cases

Not all is good with RAID 5, however. Due to the parity bit that must be calculated and written to on each drive, there is overhead.

But with the rather noticeable performance hit that RAID 5 incurs, this RAID type is best left for servers with critical data but not much need for speed.

And once again, the more you try to prove yourself right, the more you prove yourself wrong. On that VERY SAME ARTICLE they benchmarked RAID 0/1/5 and guess what??? RAID-1 was consistently faster than RAID-5 in their own benchmarks.

My claim is true and verifiable. AnandTech is a reputable website. If I recall correctly, you didn't seem to agree with this, yet you didn't back up *your* claim.

There yo go, your claim is CLEARLY false based on your own sources. Since you are the one who quoted Anandtech and said how great they are, surely you won't argue with them. And now, I have backed-up my claim with YOUR sources. I didn't bother to post any links before, because EVER SITE you could possibly visit that benchmarked a RAID-5 setup will show the SAME THING. You're the one arguing that you're right, and the rest of the world is wrong.

Will they increase the power consumption of the box?

By such a small ammount that it would be trite and banal to mention it for no particular reason.

Compared to your suggestion of using a 120mm rear and 80mm front fan, 3 80mm fans would use LESS power.

You can have a quiet PC while still maintaining proper cooling (as opposed to running a PC without any fans, as you suggest).

Yes, but just using fewer fans doesn't accomplish this, which is specifically what you implied.

A quick search on google for "cause of disk failure" reveals that heat is practically never* a cause in a drive's death,

Once again, you want me to do a google search that proves you wrong. If you had even read the SUMMARIES of the results returned on the first page, you would have seen that much. A select few quotes:

Hot spots are a very common cause of disk failure.
http://eval.veritas.com/downloads/pro/biz_value_of _vol_mgmt.pdf


Excessive heat is the #1 cause of disk failure
http://www.inostor.com/support/InoStor_NAS_Quick_I nstallation_Guide51.pdf

one could intelligently conclude that it's not the operating temperature that is an issue (as long as it's operating within spec), it's the change in temperature that matters.

No, one could not intelligently conclude that... Your method of logic is to jump around an issue in nonsensical ways, until you get an answer that is vague and meaningless.

Having any number of fans pointed at your hard drives is not going to exaggerate their extreme tempuratures, but only keep down their maximum tempurature, closer to ambient. Having less cooling that just happens to provide consistent direction is not going to make the hard drive tempuratures fluctuate any less.

Can you say "No, the inside of the disk does not need to be cooled"?

But it can be helpful in the future to dedicate, say 10% of your drive to an LVM snapshot space....

I haven't done this yet (I'm lucky! I have a real tape drive to backup my stuff.....) but I plan to make my system take a snapshot every hour and every day (total of two) so that at most I lose an hour's worth of work.

Also, I've always wondered if it was possible to make an operating system that would take as long to destroy something as it did to create it. For example, your term paper took ten days to write, so the rm termpaper.tex command would take ten days to run :)

As to tapes, I'd like to recommend Tandberg's SLR 100 tape drive utilizing the QIC tapes. They are very reliable (after 7 years of OEM with IBM, they had about a 1% failure rate). As the QIC is a cassette the tape never has to be unwound out of the cartrigde as it does in DLT and other formats.

They store 50 GB native (also available are smaller sizes).

Highly recommended.

SLR forever!

I love the Tandberg SLR tape drives. Nothing beats a quarter inch of aluminum plating.

The company I work for, InoStor, has the ValuNAS line of products; and as they are a Tandberg Data company, can provide excellent integration of near-line and offline storage (tape).

The 2.25 terabyte ValuNAS is only around $16K. It gives you a 2.4 GHz P4 processor, gigabit connection, and multiple RAID levels, including multiple disk redundancy (RAIDn). It utilizes SATA technology to allow hotswap drives at a fraction of the cost of SCSI.

The iceNAS software is very easy to use, and supports SMB/CIFS (through Samba), NFS, Appletalk, and HTTPS.

When combined with a Tandberg autoloader, this can be a very efficient storage/backup server.

The company I work for, InoStor, has the ValuNAS line of products; and as they are a Tandberg Data company, can provide excellent integration of near-line and offline storage (tape).

The 2.25 terabyte ValuNAS is only around $16K. It gives you a 2.4 GHz P4 processor, gigabit connection, and multiple RAID levels, including multiple disk redundancy (RAIDn). It utilizes SATA technology to allow hotswap drives at a fraction of the cost of SCSI.

The iceNAS software is very easy to use, and supports SMB/CIFS (through Samba), NFS, Appletalk, and HTTPS.

When combined with a Tandberg autoloader, this can be a very efficient storage/backup server.

The company I work for, InoStor, has the ValuNAS line of products; and as they are a Tandberg Data company, can provide excellent integration of near-line and offline storage (tape).

The 2.25 terabyte ValuNAS is only around $16K. It gives you a 2.4 GHz P4 processor, gigabit connection, and multiple RAID levels, including multiple disk redundancy (RAIDn). It utilizes SATA technology to allow hotswap drives at a fraction of the cost of SCSI.

The iceNAS software is very easy to use, and supports SMB/CIFS (through Samba), NFS, Appletalk, and HTTPS.

When combined with a Tandberg autoloader, this can be a very efficient storage/backup server.