Re: linux server hardware

From: Christopher Browne (cbbrowne_at_acm.org)
Date: 01/17/04 

Date: 16 Jan 2004 23:52:31 GMT

Oops! "Dave" <dspearREMOVE99ca@yahoo.com> was seen spray-painting on a wall:
> Should I be looking at SCSI? I note that there are not many
> motherboards out there with onboard SCSI, and the PCI SCSI cards,
> well they're pretty damned expensive compared to most any other
> peripheral card you might choose to buy. $500-ish for a
> dual-channel card AND the drives are more expensive. I'd like to
> put a tape drive onto the server and (2) HDs, (1) CD drive and (1)
> tape drive would max out my IDE buses; not the best situation for
> expandability. Am I missing something here that would make me
> consider IDE?

I'd think it overkill to go for a dual channel card unless you plan to
have a LOT of drives.

> Anybody out there know a Canadian online retailer where I can build
> my own system? Since my sysadmin days I've moved to the
> country... a technological backwater where the local office supplies
> chain is where residents go to give their hard-earned money to a
> high-school dropout salesman whose depth of hardware knowledge is
> limited to $500 video cards for gaming. I walked out when he
> started telling me how "you'll have trouble finding linux drivers
> for your SCSI devices" and "hardly anybody uses SCSI any more".
> Sure dude.

He's certainly talking nonsense. The vendors of SCSI devices _know_
that Linux support is vital to their sales, so controller cards tend
to be very WELL supported on Linux these days. Ancient crap may be
one thing, but you can get drivers for pretty esoteric _modern_ RAID
controllers...

There's two directions to take this.

1. SCSI is a _lot_ more reliable than IDE, particularly from the
point of view that IDE drives tend to _lie_ about whether or not they
have committed data to disk. If having all data updates is important,
then there's no question of using IDE.

2. The _other_ option is to get into IDE RAID. You don't get the
reliability of an array of SCSI drives, but you can hook a whole lot
of cheap IDE drives to a 3ware IDE RAID controller.

3. I lied. SATA will soon likely be a better option than IDE RAID,
offering much nicer cabling options. But it'll only be *much* nicer
once there are a more mature set of RAID controllers... 

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