IDE RAID Examined

Bender writes "The Tech Report has an interesting article comparing IDE RAID controllers from four of the top manufacturers. The article serves as more than just a straight product comparison, because the author has included tests for different RAID levels and different numbers of drives, plus a comprehensive series of benchmarks intended to isolate the performance quirks of each RAID controller card at each RAID level. The results raise questions about whether IDE RAID can really take the place of a more expensive SCSI storage subsystem in workstation or small-scale server environments. Worthwhile reading for the curious sysadmin." I personally would love to hear any ide-raid stories that slashdotters might have.

Comments

at the company I work for

[npietraniec]

At the company I work for, IDE RAID has become somewhat standard because we're basically cheap... At least it's standard on the servers that are fast enough to support it. The rest use dd to copy partitions between backup drives. My boss calls it "RAID point five" We lovingly refer to it as the ghetto network.

A little story

[bravehamster]

I work for a small custom computer shop. We built a system a few months back for a video editing company here in town. Obviously they needed a lot of storage, so we suggested a RAID-5 system using 6 100GB drives, giving them roughly half a terabyte of storage. The liked the idea, but insisted we used RAID-0 (the Purchasing Officer had read his PC Gamer and thought it sounded cool). We advised against it, but they insisted. 2 months down the line, a hard drive on one of their other computers breaks down. Their newly hired technician (the office managers son) saw that their big old file server had 5 hard drives in it, but was only using 1 in windows! Being the smart boy that he is, he dutifully shuts down the machine, removes one of the drives, puts it on the broken machine, formats and loads windows on it. He seemed awfully surprised when the file server wouldn't boot, and tried to blame it on us for losing a month of work. Despite our other recommendations, they had no backups. They went out of business last month.

Re:A little story

[archen]

Sort of reminds me of the place I work.

A week after I was hired the computer with the sales database died. I'm the computer guy, so I'm supposed to fix it. I was a bit surprised at what I found (keep in mind this information is supposed to be fairly important information to the company).

The computer had around 256 megs of ram. Was a database server (for sales info) that around 3-4 people were connected to at any given time. Was running WINDOWS 98 using striped IDE hard drives. Among other things that this machine was used for at any given time was graphic editing in Corel Draw (wonderfully stable too I might add), and crash prone MS Office... as well as every God awful freeware screen saver ever found, and many other useless stuff that most people didn't even know what they were supposed to do. Apparently the machine crashed at least 3 times a day, and no one thought there was anything wrong with this.

So one drive dies, and surprise the backup is done on a jazz drive that never worked right. Apparently the girl who used the computer never really read that error message regarding the Jazz drive every morning when she came in. So we had a wonderfully redundant backup with a different Jazz disk for each day of the week with nothing but garbage on all of them.

When I actually put all the pieces of the puzzle together, I just started laughing at how ridiculous the setup was.

Re:A little story

[Afrosheen]

This is where a little sound clip from the Simpsons cartoon comes in handy.

Find any two-second clip of Nelson saying "Ha Ha!" and email it to fools that destroy things after neglecting your advice. It'd be even better to find a little flash clip of Nelson pointing and laughing, it'd add insult to injury.

You asked for it...

[tmark]

I personally would love to hear any ide-raid stories that slashdotters might have.

Once upon a time, in an array far, far away, there lived a young princess who was worried about the integrity of her data...

Re:You asked for it...

[Mitchell Mebane]

Once upon a time, in an array far, far away, there lived a young princess who was worried about the integrity of her data...

She knew that elephants never forget, but they do tend to die after a while, so she hired a consultant to investigate multi-elephant solutions. He came up with RASP - Redundant Array of Short-lived Pachyderms. While SCSI (Smart Chimps Storing Information) is more reliable, elephants were a good solution for more people, because they could also be used for plowing fields.

Annoying

[cheezedawg]

You would think that after 130 graphs comparing the controllers he could come up with a stronger conclusion than "I cant really decide which one is the best"

Re:IDE Raid, inexpensive but major hassle

[Charm]

24-hour fsck

And that is why fsck is used as a swear word.