Looks more like you stated "marketing bullshit" to me. Where was the question in the original post? I suppose "troll" was chosen since "moron" was not an option.
Having one, I can certainly imagine it. What I couldn't imagine was how good it would be. 200 dpi is fantastic for image editing. Of course, if Apple didn't make it then it couldn't be good...
Text is not too small to read on this monitor regardless of what the reviewer may have said.
The Apple display is likely to be better for video not only for its refresh but also for its lower dpi. Wouldn't mind having one, but for still imaging the VP2290 is great.
I've used Adaptec, 3Ware, and Mylex and have had controller failures triggered by loss of a drive on all three. It's not that RAID firmware can't be made to work, it's just that the complexity is surprising and, in the climate of cheap drives we have today, I wonder why home users are drawn to it. A few drives with RAID 0 (either OS software or controller) plus a regular backup solution (like yours or mine) seems to me to make sense for virtually all home user requirements. I frequently lose the boot drive when a drive fails, so unless you use RAID 5 on your boot drive you're still exposed to that problem (and you don't want to put swap on a RAID 5).
The slow response of the big display is tied to the difficulty in updating its 9MP. The new Apple display is much easier to update with less than half the pixel count. That said, the IBM monitor is certainly not the first choice for video and is twice the cost.
I agree, but you have to crank things up a lot! The 30Hz refresh is the only problem with the monitor, and it's only a problem for video at that. There no flicker with LCD, of course.
I mentioned additional RAID levels because the original article did. I didn't see any reason not to address those issues solely because I felt the reader was unlikely to be interested in them. I would say it was the original author who was tooting his own horn when he wrote it but didn't bother to get the facts right.
In the case of a two drive RAID 0, consider first that you have a single drive setup. Clearly you have no redundancy in that case. By adding a drive you've added some hardware (less than half) without adding redundancy but you haven't increased you risk "many times". The increased risk is incremental and that was my point.
Now, as a practical concern, what is the chance of losing data with a RAID 5 system? In my experience it is quite high. I've used controllers from several manufacturers and have frequently lost my system due to disk failures. In the case of Mylex, my server was down 3 weeks waiting for a replacement card. Trouble is, many of these products just aren't very good.
My solution is to use a simple RAID 0 and back the data up using rsync nightly to a second box. Using an external firewire box is a reasonable solution as well provided it's big enough. Few people at home really need syncronous mirroring and doing it this way is cheap, easy and fast.
I have very few problems with this display and WinXP, certainly none involving GUI widgets. It boots into a low-res mode which is quite irritating and Minesweeper is quite difficult.
The monitor requires two DVI connections, not four (it has A and B inputs though). The four sections of the screen are updated by interleaving thus providing an effective 30Hz refresh. Not good for gaming or 60 fps video but fantastic otherwise. Anyone who thinks this new Apple display is the definitive content creation display knows nothing of the real king.
Because for virtually everything either interface could be used?
Firewire may be designed for peer-to-peer but how many applications of that are there? Two video cameras configured for master/slave editing comes to mind. USB can be used without a computer as well so long as one device is configured to control the interface. Fact is, USB and 1394 are very much competitors. Firewire is more suitable in some cases and USB others but there is considerable overlap.
The IBM monitor being referred to is glorious. It is 23", not 22", and 3840 pixels wide, not 3940. The high dpi (about 200) is quite useful for image editing but can be problematic for text. Still, I use it as my everyday monitor. Eyestrain is not a problem even for my old eyes.
Apple implies that this is the biggest, baddest monitor yet but only gets it right because it's a 30" display. It's probably a better general purpose display than the IBM but certainly not as good for image editing. Of course, it's half the price and probably offers better refresh rates. If any of you think the IBM is not well suited to everyday tasks you are crazy. The only things it doesn't do well are associated with its 30Hz refresh, not its spectacular 200dpi resolution.
As if that would work. After RTFA try turning on your brain.
For you to make this arrangement work, you would have to split the drives into halves, create a RAID 0 array on each have, then mirror one array with the other. In addition, you would reverse the role of the drives in the two arrays so that mirrored blocks would always reside on opposite splindles. Then, to avoid large seeks you would strip partition 0, drive 0 with partition 1, drive 1 and likewise 1,0 with 0,1. For all this fancy manipulation what you end up with is EXACTLY RAID 1. Why? Because it's impossible to do both RAID 0 and RAID simultaneously with just two spindles. Writes must go to both while reads can come from either. Just like RAID 1.
Except that's ridiculous. It can't possibly work since all data must be stored on both disks somewhere. Writes must go to both disks while reads could be done from either. You get that with simple mirroring in the first place.
A two drive RAID 0 does not increase the "data of data loss" by 4x. It increases the risk by the amount associated with one additional disk drive (which is incremental). The risk of data loss on the other drive and from the controller already exists.
RAID 1 includes data striping so it only requires an even number of drives. RAID 0+1, 1+0, and 10 are marketing terms invented to make products sound more feature-rich and have come into popular use. Read the original RAID paper and you'll see that RAID 1 is not just simple mirroring but includes "drive arrays".
The wasted space of arrays of mirrored drives is the same as that of a single mirrored drive. The overall extra cost has to consider the whole system. In smaller systems, say 4 drives instead of 3, the added cost of a more expensive RAID 5 controller or extra cache to help accelerate writes will overwhealm the cost of one additional drive. RAID 1 systems are not automatically the most expensive.
RAID 3 is differentiated from RAID 5 by its dedicated parity and small (originally word-sized) interleave. It has never been replaced by RAID 5 but rather by RAID 4 with single sector interleaves. Parity schemes are now described by distributed or dedicated parity and by large or small interleave factors. RAID 3 was most well suited to hardware implementations as was RAID 2 which you omitted entirely.
The typical person who buys a cheap, 4 port IDE RAID card wants the most capacity he can get out of 4 drives so RAID 0 or 5 is inevitable. That doesn't make those RAID levels always the best choices. Since that user's typically not performance-sensitive (especially writes) any RAID configuration will be satisfactory. Home users typically can't appreciate the performance difference between levels so they often believe they don't exist.
Of course, a deidicated RAID 1 controller manages all the details as well and rebuilds are equally quick and painless.
More drives increases the chance of multiple failures but more capacity does not. In addition, RAID 1 tolerates multiple failures in many cases but can only protect against one arbitrary failure for sure. Dual channel, 6 per channel, and so many drives per IU is all just SCSI stuff. None of those comments are relevent to RAID itself.
I own several 3Ware controllers and they do definitely suck. They don't virtualize the disks, their rebuild performance is terrible (and syncronous) and they crash every time a disk fails.
If you approach every problem with the assumption that drives come in units of six and you'll always want maximum capacity, then the answer will always be RAID 0 or RAID 5. That's not how it works though.
RAID 1 offers considerable advantage over RAID 5 in write performance (approaching that of RAID 0) and offers better read performance as well. RAID 1 offers 2N spindles to read from versus RAID 5's (N+1) spindles. Parallel access arrays commonly see load profiles that can take advantage of N>3, so if you don't have that type of load I don't think you know what's really going on. If the assumption is that your command queue depths never get past 3 then your in serious performance trouble or you have no need for real hardware. You may want to read Patterson.
Which in a properly configured system for simultaneous access will be essentially never. RAID 0 is sometimes used with small stripe sizes for large file applications but it is much more commonly used with large stripe sizes. My original comment stands as anyone can verify by noting that larger drives in the same series tend to be faster strictly by their increased capacity. No matter what the stripe size this is true because the virtual disk is an integer multiple of a single spindle's capacity. Seek distance is reduced and average access time improves (even if it's only modestly).
I might add that when small stripe sizes are used in applications that accelerate large file performance (the kind you quote) spindle-sync is always used. As a result, all drives complete a seek in the same time it takes one drive to, yet they are all faster since they have less distance to seek.
Anyone who starts out with a chassis with a 6 disk limitation and discusses the merits of RAID levels is, to put it simply, no expert. To answer your question, it depends on my workload and my capacity requirements. If I'm performance sensitive and write a lot I would rather have the 750GB version since I know the 1250GB version will suck relatively speaking.
It's not wise to think in terms of total disk count but rather total number of data drives in any case. A four drive RAID 5 is more directly comparable in function to a 6 drive RAID 1 except for the drive count, but drive count is simply one of the costs. Since cost is generally the objection to RAID 1, this type of comparison makes sense. First choose your capacity, then add either one drive or a second set depending on RAID level. Then add the cost of the controller (which may well be different for RAID 1 and 5). In this case it's easy to imagine that RAID 1 kicks RAID 5's ass with similar cost. RAID 5 only makes sense for much greater drive counts.
Now, I didn't say hotswap was superfluous, either. I said that it is seldom a true requirement and that it is highly overrated. Apparently you agree.
Trouble is that there are far fewer decent RAID 5 controllers than there are RAID controllers on the market.
If you remove the extra "wasted" disks you do indeed get less noise, power and heat and you can room but you do not get more storage. If you have fewer "wasted" disks you may indeed get more storage but not less noise, power and heat or more room. You don't get it all at the same time. Redundant disks are not "wasted" either. They perform a vital function and can contribute to increased performance.
In a 4 disk RAID 5 you can get substantially better read performance than your two disk RAID 0, so what you say makes sense given that reads sufficiently dominate writes. If that's the case, your RAID 5 should outperform a single disk handily as well.
Given my bad experiences with low cost RAID controllers (and not so low in cost either) I've given up on everything other than RAID 0. Instead, I build two machines and run rsync between them. Can't argue with the performance, either, just so long as overnight is quick enough to achieve a backup.
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$2500 for the HR256 and PCI only? No thanks! You can get an AGP card that drives these displays for far less than $1000.
Perhaps you should use that for your monitor then. I bet it'd work great for video.
I'd imagine software support for anything other than Windows is nonexistent.
...and anything else not requiring 60 fps video. Web browsing, word processing, etc are all fine.
Looks more like you stated "marketing bullshit" to me. Where was the question in the original post? I suppose "troll" was chosen since "moron" was not an option.
You would be incorrect in guessing that (and stupid as well).
Of course, since this is a badge-engineered IBM display he Viewsonic name is pretty much irrrelevant.
Having one, I can certainly imagine it. What I couldn't imagine was how good it would be. 200 dpi is fantastic for image editing. Of course, if Apple didn't make it then it couldn't be good...
Mine has one. It's easily seen but causes no problem or distraction.
Text is not too small to read on this monitor regardless of what the reviewer may have said.
The Apple display is likely to be better for video not only for its refresh but also for its lower dpi. Wouldn't mind having one, but for still imaging the VP2290 is great.
I've used Adaptec, 3Ware, and Mylex and have had controller failures triggered by loss of a drive on all three. It's not that RAID firmware can't be made to work, it's just that the complexity is surprising and, in the climate of cheap drives we have today, I wonder why home users are drawn to it. A few drives with RAID 0 (either OS software or controller) plus a regular backup solution (like yours or mine) seems to me to make sense for virtually all home user requirements. I frequently lose the boot drive when a drive fails, so unless you use RAID 5 on your boot drive you're still exposed to that problem (and you don't want to put swap on a RAID 5).
The slow response of the big display is tied to the difficulty in updating its 9MP. The new Apple display is much easier to update with less than half the pixel count. That said, the IBM monitor is certainly not the first choice for video and is twice the cost.
I agree, but you have to crank things up a lot! The 30Hz refresh is the only problem with the monitor, and it's only a problem for video at that. There no flicker with LCD, of course.
I mentioned additional RAID levels because the original article did. I didn't see any reason not to address those issues solely because I felt the reader was unlikely to be interested in them. I would say it was the original author who was tooting his own horn when he wrote it but didn't bother to get the facts right.
In the case of a two drive RAID 0, consider first that you have a single drive setup. Clearly you have no redundancy in that case. By adding a drive you've added some hardware (less than half) without adding redundancy but you haven't increased you risk "many times". The increased risk is incremental and that was my point.
Now, as a practical concern, what is the chance of losing data with a RAID 5 system? In my experience it is quite high. I've used controllers from several manufacturers and have frequently lost my system due to disk failures. In the case of Mylex, my server was down 3 weeks waiting for a replacement card. Trouble is, many of these products just aren't very good.
My solution is to use a simple RAID 0 and back the data up using rsync nightly to a second box. Using an external firewire box is a reasonable solution as well provided it's big enough. Few people at home really need syncronous mirroring and doing it this way is cheap, easy and fast.
I have very few problems with this display and WinXP, certainly none involving GUI widgets. It boots into a low-res mode which is quite irritating and Minesweeper is quite difficult.
The monitor requires two DVI connections, not four (it has A and B inputs though). The four sections of the screen are updated by interleaving thus providing an effective 30Hz refresh. Not good for gaming or 60 fps video but fantastic otherwise. Anyone who thinks this new Apple display is the definitive content creation display knows nothing of the real king.
Because for virtually everything either interface could be used?
Firewire may be designed for peer-to-peer but how many applications of that are there? Two video cameras configured for master/slave editing comes to mind. USB can be used without a computer as well so long as one device is configured to control the interface. Fact is, USB and 1394 are very much competitors. Firewire is more suitable in some cases and USB others but there is considerable overlap.
The IBM monitor being referred to is glorious. It is 23", not 22", and 3840 pixels wide, not 3940. The high dpi (about 200) is quite useful for image editing but can be problematic for text. Still, I use it as my everyday monitor. Eyestrain is not a problem even for my old eyes.
Apple implies that this is the biggest, baddest monitor yet but only gets it right because it's a 30" display. It's probably a better general purpose display than the IBM but certainly not as good for image editing. Of course, it's half the price and probably offers better refresh rates. If any of you think the IBM is not well suited to everyday tasks you are crazy. The only things it doesn't do well are associated with its 30Hz refresh, not its spectacular 200dpi resolution.
As if that would work. After RTFA try turning on your brain.
For you to make this arrangement work, you would have to split the drives into halves, create a RAID 0 array on each have, then mirror one array with the other. In addition, you would reverse the role of the drives in the two arrays so that mirrored blocks would always reside on opposite splindles. Then, to avoid large seeks you would strip partition 0, drive 0 with partition 1, drive 1 and likewise 1,0 with 0,1. For all this fancy manipulation what you end up with is EXACTLY RAID 1. Why? Because it's impossible to do both RAID 0 and RAID simultaneously with just two spindles. Writes must go to both while reads can come from either. Just like RAID 1.
They did. It's not new and it's a sham.
Except that's ridiculous. It can't possibly work since all data must be stored on both disks somewhere. Writes must go to both disks while reads could be done from either. You get that with simple mirroring in the first place.
A two drive RAID 0 does not increase the "data of data loss" by 4x. It increases the risk by the amount associated with one additional disk drive (which is incremental). The risk of data loss on the other drive and from the controller already exists.
RAID 1 includes data striping so it only requires an even number of drives. RAID 0+1, 1+0, and 10 are marketing terms invented to make products sound more feature-rich and have come into popular use. Read the original RAID paper and you'll see that RAID 1 is not just simple mirroring but includes "drive arrays".
The wasted space of arrays of mirrored drives is the same as that of a single mirrored drive. The overall extra cost has to consider the whole system. In smaller systems, say 4 drives instead of 3, the added cost of a more expensive RAID 5 controller or extra cache to help accelerate writes will overwhealm the cost of one additional drive. RAID 1 systems are not automatically the most expensive.
RAID 3 is differentiated from RAID 5 by its dedicated parity and small (originally word-sized) interleave. It has never been replaced by RAID 5 but rather by RAID 4 with single sector interleaves. Parity schemes are now described by distributed or dedicated parity and by large or small interleave factors. RAID 3 was most well suited to hardware implementations as was RAID 2 which you omitted entirely.
The typical person who buys a cheap, 4 port IDE RAID card wants the most capacity he can get out of 4 drives so RAID 0 or 5 is inevitable. That doesn't make those RAID levels always the best choices. Since that user's typically not performance-sensitive (especially writes) any RAID configuration will be satisfactory. Home users typically can't appreciate the performance difference between levels so they often believe they don't exist.
Of course, a deidicated RAID 1 controller manages all the details as well and rebuilds are equally quick and painless.
More drives increases the chance of multiple failures but more capacity does not. In addition, RAID 1 tolerates multiple failures in many cases but can only protect against one arbitrary failure for sure. Dual channel, 6 per channel, and so many drives per IU is all just SCSI stuff. None of those comments are relevent to RAID itself.
I own several 3Ware controllers and they do definitely suck. They don't virtualize the disks, their rebuild performance is terrible (and syncronous) and they crash every time a disk fails.
If you approach every problem with the assumption that drives come in units of six and you'll always want maximum capacity, then the answer will always be RAID 0 or RAID 5. That's not how it works though.
RAID 1 offers considerable advantage over RAID 5 in write performance (approaching that of RAID 0) and offers better read performance as well. RAID 1 offers 2N spindles to read from versus RAID 5's (N+1) spindles. Parallel access arrays commonly see load profiles that can take advantage of N>3, so if you don't have that type of load I don't think you know what's really going on. If the assumption is that your command queue depths never get past 3 then your in serious performance trouble or you have no need for real hardware. You may want to read Patterson.
Which in a properly configured system for simultaneous access will be essentially never. RAID 0 is sometimes used with small stripe sizes for large file applications but it is much more commonly used with large stripe sizes. My original comment stands as anyone can verify by noting that larger drives in the same series tend to be faster strictly by their increased capacity. No matter what the stripe size this is true because the virtual disk is an integer multiple of a single spindle's capacity. Seek distance is reduced and average access time improves (even if it's only modestly).
I might add that when small stripe sizes are used in applications that accelerate large file performance (the kind you quote) spindle-sync is always used. As a result, all drives complete a seek in the same time it takes one drive to, yet they are all faster since they have less distance to seek.
Anyone who starts out with a chassis with a 6 disk limitation and discusses the merits of RAID levels is, to put it simply, no expert. To answer your question, it depends on my workload and my capacity requirements. If I'm performance sensitive and write a lot I would rather have the 750GB version since I know the 1250GB version will suck relatively speaking.
It's not wise to think in terms of total disk count but rather total number of data drives in any case. A four drive RAID 5 is more directly comparable in function to a 6 drive RAID 1 except for the drive count, but drive count is simply one of the costs. Since cost is generally the objection to RAID 1, this type of comparison makes sense. First choose your capacity, then add either one drive or a second set depending on RAID level. Then add the cost of the controller (which may well be different for RAID 1 and 5). In this case it's easy to imagine that RAID 1 kicks RAID 5's ass with similar cost. RAID 5 only makes sense for much greater drive counts.
Now, I didn't say hotswap was superfluous, either. I said that it is seldom a true requirement and that it is highly overrated. Apparently you agree.
Trouble is that there are far fewer decent RAID 5 controllers than there are RAID controllers on the market.
If you remove the extra "wasted" disks you do indeed get less noise, power and heat and you can room but you do not get more storage. If you have fewer "wasted" disks you may indeed get more storage but not less noise, power and heat or more room. You don't get it all at the same time. Redundant disks are not "wasted" either. They perform a vital function and can contribute to increased performance.
In a 4 disk RAID 5 you can get substantially better read performance than your two disk RAID 0, so what you say makes sense given that reads sufficiently dominate writes. If that's the case, your RAID 5 should outperform a single disk handily as well.
Given my bad experiences with low cost RAID controllers (and not so low in cost either) I've given up on everything other than RAID 0. Instead, I build two machines and run rsync between them. Can't argue with the performance, either, just so long as overnight is quick enough to achieve a backup.