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Notebooks w/ RAID?
macemoneta asks: "Are there any notebooks available on the market that support (bootable) RAID (at least two 40GB+ drives as RAID0 and or RAID1)? While the rest of the components in 'desktop replacement' notebooks are quickly getting up to snuff, the hard drives are anemic in performance, capacity and reliability compared to desktops. Being able to use software RAID to create high performance meta devices and high reliability meta devices would really kick notebooks into high gear. Before anyone complains about size, weight, power and heat remember that notebooks have gone from 12 inch screens to 16 inch screens and 486 to P4M in the last few years. Most desktop replacement laptops use the batteries as a UPS, since they usually only last 90 minutes or less anyway."
Admittedly I am not a fan of big laptops. If you need to take data around, get a usb/firewaire HD. If you need a portable work environment, you can get an 800Mhz 256MB 30GB laptop in a sub 3 ound .75" thick form. For presentations a 3 pound laptop and a 3 pound projector so the job better than a 16" laptop screen anyway.
Spencer Ogden
You would do well to simplify the question by asking if there are notebooks available with multiple hard drives. Lilo can boot to a software raid, so any notebook with two drives can do this. Whether the sound card or built-in ethernet/modem works is a different story, but you didn't mention whether those were important to you.
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DELL's new inspiron with the 64MB Geforce4Go will take two 40 gig drives and can software RAID across them with linux.
beware of the expense -- its around $7K fully loaded with all options including multiple batteries which you will need if you use both hard drives RAIDed.
I'm not sure this is a good idea. Laptop drives, even the recent IBM enhanced models, are rated for a much lighter activity cycle than desktop drives. That is, push them as hard and as long as full-size drives , they are likely to fail on you. IBM is trying to fix this to make their 2.5 in drives suitable to blade servers. Still, RAID historically pushes drives hard enough to decrease the time between failures quite a bit. Combine this with drives designed for low load, and you're asking for trouble. I think the recommendation of a firewire external drive was a good one.
I would rather have a 15000 RPM harddrive, than 2 4800 rpm drives in a laptop. Space, battery, etc..
Tibbon
tibbon.com
There is a few model of Toshiba notebook computers that let you remove the CD/DVD/CDRW drives and put in a second HDD in it's place. You'd probably have to setup software raid for it.
A two disk raid would only provide redundancy or increased speed for writing. There are no data collection boards I can think of that would produce data at a high enough rate to make ATA100 drives inadequate. I assume this is for some kind of embedded data collect device, in which case you may want to consider an array of wireless transport technologies to an offsite RAID. If is a redundancy concern due to mechanical trouble, look into solid state drives, which are gettig quite large.
At my place of employ, we've been pleasantly surprised with the performance of the latest latest laptop hard drives, actually. Compares quite favorably to anything but 7200 RPM drives, at least for what we do (software development).
Depending on how you configure it, some Thinkpads can take two IDE drives. But I suspect your best bet is to get a pair of 3.5" drives in an external case and either hook up via FireWire or SCSI. I doubt that 2.5" IDE drives will take well to RAID 0.
Gentoo Sucks
How about the Dell Precision M50? Two HDD bays, the RAID would have to be software... expensive, yes - but it's an option.
The Eurocom 8880 has the capability for FOUR hard drives at once
8 .c fm
:)
http://www.eurocom.ca/products/showroom/specs88
Has the capability for two cdroms/dvd-roms/etc at once.
15.7" screen as well.
No mention of weight, I suspect you don't wanna know.
Eurocom has always been a little bit ahead of everyone else on getting things out
I believe the TV tuner option replaces one of the media bays though
Perhaps this would do the trick? It even comes with a Li-Ion battery.
Whoever designed level 61 in Frozen Bubble is a sadistic bastard.
Maybe in the near future, we will see Serial ATA RAID controllers utilizing a PC Card slot that supports say two drives in either RAID 0 or RAID 1, that would connect to drives and powered by either a battery or an external power source.
Software RAID under Windows may not be the most optimal solution due to it's processor overhead, but it's still a somewhat viable option.
It would have to be software raid, but you can run two hard drives with newer dell laptops. Dell has a $30 carrier that allows you to use a hard drive in the media bay. For my inspiron 8200 the part number is 29MFN for a 9.5mm drive. For a drive, look at the IBM 40GNX with 8mb of cache. There are lots of discussions on this at dell's forums at delltalk.us.dell.com in the inspiron hard drive forum.
Sorry, but I gotta complain about your definition of desktop replacement. I want a desktop replacement laptop because I can take it to class and meetings. I love taking notes on my laptop for 8 hours without plugging in. Meeting minutes should be sent out within 1 minute of the meeting ending. When someone is in a meeting they should be able to get at the unexpected data they need that is on their desk, without leaving the room (that is the data is on the computer, so any computer can access it), not run back to their desk to price off a hard copy. Sure the batteries are a UPS, but if that is all you use your laptop for, a desktop with a UPS is cheaper and has a better keyboard, and monitor.
When I need more power than is on my laptop, then I ssh over to one of our CPU servers (at my last job we had a couple machines set up for this), and display my apps back to the laptop.
Laptop users should not have a big harddrive. They should have enough room for the OS, a few apps that they run on the road, and a copy of the documents they use often. Note I said copy, the master copy of these documents should be someplace that is always backed up, the laptop just has a copy for quick work until it can be synced with the master (two way sync). Other than that, long battery life, weight (the mass of even a heavey laptop is not enough to make a difference in gravity humans can stand, so weight is the critical), screen, keyboard, and interfaces are key.
Remember laptops are stolen; droped and broke; and forgotten far too often to have the master copy of anything. They should be easially replaceable. Too expensive to be disposable, but too fragile to depend on any one.
When you lock yourself into the desk is where I work, you miss the power that a laptop gives you. Get a laptop that you can use anywhere, wireless networking in the office (warning, security issues need to be addressed here), with a battery that is worth something. Suddenly the laptop goes from an expensive toy that to impress people to a useful tool that does things you couldn't get done otherwise.
Wow, so many links to expensive hardware. Pick up a used Pismo powerbook (last black one). You can take out the CD drive, and replace it with another laptop drive. Sleds are available from VST, probably find some used ones too. OSX has software RAID-1 built in.
You could use any of the black line, but the Pismos often had 500MHz G3's.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Ouch. Weight is listed in the full specifications. Only 2 hours of battery life too. That's not too bad for all that's in it, though, and CDN$2999 doesn't seems too unreasonable a price.
For a modern multi-tasking operating system like Linux or BSD, SCSI is a better answer than RAID. I've always found interactive use much better than with IDE, even than the newer ATA-100 and ATA-133 drives. IBM used to make RS/6000s with 2.5" SCSI drives and titanium cases. There were really sweet!
Wil
wiki
Being able to use software RAID to create high performance meta devices and high reliability meta devices would really kick notebooks into high gear.
Can someone explain to me what a "meta device" is? And, can some explain to me what happens when you get a plurality of "meta devices?" I mean, what the hell is this guy blathering about?
I'm sure other people are going to point out that RAID probably isn't the solution to the problem you think you're having. It's like hoping that forged connecting rods and pistons are going to make your Dodge Neon into a sports car. By itself, it's not going to do what you seem to hope it will do.
Anyhow, if you want a good, decent, fast notebook get yourself and Apple.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
That said, I'm not so sure you want to buy anything with onboard RAID. Perhaps you should look at a speedy Firewire drive.
With a 15k rpm drive your notebook will sound like a jet engine, and probably consume about as much fuel...
Get any laptop that can take 2 HD (Thinkpad would be my preference, install Win2k and setup active directory on both drives. You can then enable Win2k's software RAID, done. Setting up an array with 2.5" drives as been done before. Check out these articles at Tom's hardwareq 1/020301/i ndex.html3 /010906/ind ex.html
http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage/02
http://www6.tomshardware.com/howto/01q
About "macdaddy" clockwork spike. I would suspect the Promise driver is the problem. Try disabling the RAID controller and run the Win2k software RAID instead.
The capacity is limited to the data density that can be put onto the platters. You have to realise that there are not as many platters, and they are much smaller. In order to get even the same storage size from a laptop hard drive, the data density would have to be much much greater than that of a normal hard drive. This means that unless they stop making desktop hard drives that have the highest density possible at the time, laptop hard drives cannot, and will never hold as much data as their bigger brothers.
:)
Also, on reliability, you have to realise how much torture these little drives go through. They are banged around in your laptop case/backpack and moved while spinning. To keep it reliable, the manufacturer of my laptop drive says to only use the laptop on a stable flat surface (unmoving, not legs or anything like that) and to NEVER move the laptop when it is on. Your desktop drive never gets moved while on (well, the normal person never moves it), and is very rarely, if all, banged around (occasional lan party). In order to keep the angular momentum from being too great when they are moved, so they don't really wear out bearing and whatnot fast and to save battery power, they are made to spin much slower. A 10000 RPM hard drive wouldn't last nearly as long as a slower one, unless you never picked up your computer while it was on, or banged it around (just don't move it and it will most likely last as long as desktop drive, maybe even longer).
Also, fluid bearings are getting very popular with
the newer drives. This helps to keep them from damaging themselves when they are banged around when off.
Why they don't use raid, I realy don't know. Most laptops support multiple hard drives (Toshiba), but most of the time they are removable. If you add another hard drive, where will you put it? If you have ever opened one of the newer (or even fairly old) laptops up, you will realise how crammed everything is. They are fitting a whole computer in the size of a keyboard. Adding another permanent hard drive, at least on mine, would require it to be quite a bit bigger (in terms of laptop size) because they would have to add room the size of the hard drive, plus some space for brackets. That would be about 2/5 an inch thicker. They could stack them without having to add much more room, but then you will have overheating, and once again, reliability problems.
And, IMHO, these are what they claim to be, desktop replacements, not server replacements. Why would you really need a SCSI or RAID configuration? The time you will save loading, compared to a standard desktop hard drive might only add up to tens of hours a year. To me, thats not worth the *reliability* or price, except for the coolness factor...heheh
They are just adding good cooling techniques (watercooled) that would allow for more compact cramming of parts. So now they don't have an excuse...
If you want something that will last, buy a toughbook! These things are garanteed to not break if dropped onto cement from arms length. But they are big and heavy and ugly as hell.
I know, a guy wants what a guy wants, but what is it you are actually trying to accomplish?
... I am not particularly confident that any software RAID is going to go noticably faster than direct access to a single (fast) drive.
Faster throughput?
Data protection against failure?
Larger partition (one massive partition across two drives)?
Impress your friends? (don't laugh, some social circles judge you on your toys)
If your intent is to get more performance, I question whether software based RAID 0 is going to actually make your system faster, particularly if the CPU is already burdened with things like running the OS, doing compression, playback of whatever you are playing back
If you want to go faster consider SuperSpeed's disk caching products http://www.superspeed.com/ - in particular you can shadow an entire partition with a read write cache if you have enough RAM. If the dataset is too large for that they have a read write cache that is configurable also (but doesn't shadow cache the entire drive).
Want larger partitions, impress your friends, or RAID 1 for data protection against hardware failure (this is going to SUCK for throughput though, if software RAID1) then most of the large Dell laptops can put a second drive in the removable bay for a second drive for RAID.
Glonoinha
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer