Re: Cheap RAID system recommendation?

In article <Pine.GSO.4.44.0208201831350.16901-100000_at_grover.rite- group.com>, you said (and I quote):

> >
> > Not even Ultra160??
> >
> > Shocked.
>
> You're making the (all too common, alas) mistake of confusing
> the speed of the bus with the speed of the drive. The Ultra 160
> bus can tranfer 160 MB/S (or whatever), but you'll need several
> drives operating in parallel to achieve that. The individual
> drives will be much more limited.
>
> Regarding the original question, remember the old tenet:
>
> Fast, safe, or cheap: pick two.
>
> It's as true today as it's always been...
>

Yup. What he said.
;-)

In fact, I still contend that even with enough drives you can't saturate a 160 bus with current disk technology. The SCSI bus is a serial bus. Ie, you can't have more than one individual SCSI packet travelling at a time. Very fast, but one at a time.
You'd need some purty synchronized I/O requests to achieve the bus speed capacity and streaming with parallel disk ops. In fact, unless the disks had an in built fast cache and controller it would be just about impossible to achieve.

-- 
Cheers
Nuno Souto
nsouto_at_optushome.com.au.nospam