RAID controllers

Lachlan Cranswick lachlan at ldeo.columbia.edu
Sat Apr 14 22:52:08 BST 2001


>> There's a wide range though, how many disks will you be using and what
>> are they?
>
>We'll be using 3 36.7Gb U160 IBM Ultrastars (unless anyone really
>recommends anything else...) in a RAID5 configuration and hot-pluggableness
>is essential.
>
>So what would you recommend and at what cost does it come?

What is the failure rate of RAID - not from the hard-disks, but
either from the RAID controller - or the motherboard or non-hard
disk part of the server?

---------

As an aside, is the following reasonable as a "budget" 
substitute for a RAID system which assumes complete 
system failure of either a SCSI card - hard disk or 
motherboard?  
acceptable - but not too much)

Generic PC Hardware and:

"SCSI Card one" with two external SCSI hard-disks - 1a and 1b
   First Hard disk  - for Web and FTP data
   Second Hard disk - for system, web and ftp logs

"SCSI Card two" with 2 external SCSI hard-disks "rsyncing" the data 
at regular intervals from SCSI Card 1

(plus a tape backup device - with offsite tape storage)

Lachlan.

-----------------------
Lachlan M. D. Cranswick
Geochemistry - Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University
PO Box 1000, 61 Route 9W Palisades, New York 10964-1000 USA
Tel:  (845) 365-8662   Fax:  (845) 365-8155 
E-mail: lachlan at ldeo.columbia.edu  WWW: http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu
       CCP14 Xtal Software Website: http://www.ccp14.ac.uk






More information about the Ukfreebsd mailing list