The Professor states that his storage technology works "with no conventionally moving parts" - maybe he is using unconventionally moving parts instead? O-)
Right Tool for the Right Job[TM]
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Why Not MySQL?
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· Score: 1
I used to use Postgres for my website. Now I use MySQL. Why did I switch? Well, in the beginning, I had no idea about RDBMs, so I asked people who might know. They told me to use Postgres, so I did. But handling BLOBs in Postgres sucks big time. So I created a class of virtual BLOBs in their own tables. My project went up hundreds of lines for stuff that shouldn't. Then, being better informed about things I wanted, I had a look at other RDBMs, and found MySQL. Now my project is down to the real important stuff, needs no more locking (I needed locking for those multi-table virtual BLOBs in Postgres), and works much faster, and I must say, more reliable for me. Your mileage may vary. Its always a question if Right Tool for the Right Job[TM].
Back in "Ye Olden Times" I striped the larger parts of two 540MB disks into one: hda1 was root, hdb1 was swap, hda2 and hdb2 together were/home. This worked flawlessly, even under heavy load, and all from ide0 on a '386. Of course, it was not the real performance tiger, but it did the job.
Second Try
Later, I used a stripe running over five disks: hdb2 was the upper part of an 1.6GB, and hdc1, hdd1, hde1 and hdf1 were 1.2GB disks. The ide0 was on the motherboard, ide1 and ide2 were $10 add-on-cards with one dil-something chip, originally designed for CDROMs, but capable of being jumpered to anything from ide0 to ide3. Another "works, but does not scream" solution.
Current Experiment
Just this weekend, I added a second PCI-based IDE-adapter to my (new [1]) machine. When I asked my hardware dealer for an additional IDE under Linux, he shrugged, as even they never had experiences with additional IDEs, leave alone ones running under Linux. So I gave it a try, in desperate search for more HD space... And it worked.
I bought a "3201 Ultra DMA-33MHZ IDE Card". The "Manual" (a folded 8"x6" paper, propably translated from chinese to english by some martian) stated that the "3201 can co-exist with M/B IDE port, so you can add 3201 to add 4 devices into your system." (their spelling, not mine).
As I could not derive which jumper(s) to set or not set from the "Manual", I just plugged it in, with one spare drive attached to give the machine something to find. At first, it found nothing. Then I disabled the MBs onboard IDE and changed the drive types in the bios to "AUTO". At the next boot, the on-board EProm kicked in and searched and found the drive attached to the 3201. I rebooted again, re-activated the MBs IDE, and, behold, it found the drives from the onboard IDE and the drive on the plugin IDE. Linux immediately recognized ide2 with hde attached, and worked flawlessly. Drawback: ide2 eats IQR11, and so far I found no way to map it to 14/15. the ide3 is not yet in use, so I'm not sure wether it eats an additional IRQ or not.
Description of the Card
The 3201 features a CMD 646U2, a bugfixed and improved version of the CMD640 when I read the chips manuals correctly. There is an EPROM with the BIOS on the card, the ide-connectors, jumpers, a connector for the LED, and quite a bunch of resistor arrays (terminators, pull-downs, etc). The name of the company is printed on the boy, not on the "Manual", so I can't look it up now. The card is "made in taiwan" and seems to be of good quality (although there *is* room for improvement). The price was DM 139 (roughly US$75), which is propably due to the low demand for cards like this (the chip is available for US$9 in quantities).
[1] Well, newer than the one before... Its there for disk space, not for speed.
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The Professor states that his storage technology works "with no conventionally moving parts" - maybe he is using unconventionally moving parts instead? O-)
I used to use Postgres for my website. Now I use MySQL. Why did I switch?
Well, in the beginning, I had no idea about RDBMs, so I asked people who might know. They told me to use Postgres, so I did. But handling BLOBs in Postgres sucks big time. So I created a class of virtual BLOBs in their own tables. My project went up hundreds of lines for stuff that shouldn't.
Then, being better informed about things I wanted, I had a look at other RDBMs, and found MySQL. Now my project is down to the real important stuff, needs no more locking (I needed locking for those multi-table virtual BLOBs in Postgres), and works much faster, and I must say, more reliable for me.
Your mileage may vary. Its always a question if Right Tool for the Right Job[TM].
First Try
/home. This worked flawlessly, even under heavy load, and all from ide0 on a '386. Of course, it was not the real performance tiger, but it did the job.
Back in "Ye Olden Times" I striped the larger parts of two 540MB disks into one: hda1 was root, hdb1 was swap, hda2 and hdb2 together were
Second Try
Later, I used a stripe running over five disks: hdb2 was the upper part of an 1.6GB, and hdc1, hdd1, hde1 and hdf1 were 1.2GB disks. The ide0 was on the motherboard, ide1 and ide2 were $10 add-on-cards with one dil-something chip, originally designed for CDROMs, but capable of being jumpered to anything from ide0 to ide3.
Another "works, but does not scream" solution.
Current Experiment
Just this weekend, I added a second PCI-based IDE-adapter to my (new [1]) machine. When I asked my hardware dealer for an additional IDE under Linux, he shrugged, as even they never had experiences with additional IDEs, leave alone ones running under Linux. So I gave it a try, in desperate search for more HD space... And it worked.
I bought a "3201 Ultra DMA-33MHZ IDE Card". The "Manual" (a folded 8"x6" paper, propably translated from chinese to english by some martian) stated that the "3201 can co-exist with M/B IDE port, so you can add 3201 to add 4 devices into your system." (their spelling, not mine).
As I could not derive which jumper(s) to set or not set from the "Manual", I just plugged it in, with one spare drive attached to give the machine something to find. At first, it found nothing. Then I disabled the MBs onboard IDE and changed the drive types in the bios to "AUTO". At the next boot, the on-board EProm kicked in and searched and found the drive attached to the 3201. I rebooted again, re-activated the MBs IDE, and, behold, it found the drives from the onboard IDE and the drive on the plugin IDE. Linux immediately recognized ide2 with hde attached, and worked flawlessly. Drawback: ide2 eats IQR11, and so far I found no way to map it to 14/15. the ide3 is not yet in use, so I'm not sure wether it eats an additional IRQ or not.
Description of the Card
The 3201 features a CMD 646U2, a bugfixed and improved version of the CMD640 when I read the chips manuals correctly. There is an EPROM with the BIOS on the card, the ide-connectors, jumpers, a connector for the LED, and quite a bunch of resistor arrays (terminators, pull-downs, etc). The name of the company is printed on the boy, not on the "Manual", so I can't look it up now. The card is "made in taiwan" and seems to be of good quality (although there *is* room for improvement). The price was DM 139 (roughly US$75), which is propably due to the low demand for cards like this (the chip is available for US$9 in quantities).
[1] Well, newer than the one before... Its there for disk space, not for speed.