[VAXman(Admin)]

Originally posted by gmknobl
What's wrong with the easily available SATA? Don't tell me you still want IDE/EIDE? Got something readily available that is faster and on most easily obtainable motherboards AND isn't SCSI (otherwise known as the devil's work)?

Yikes! IDE! What a complete brain<casual obscenity obscured>!!!

SCSI is just one big pain in the ARS. Boots too slow and size is a problem unless you want to spend mucho buckos. The only thing that makes it attractive is speed when moving very large files. Unless you do that a lot, you won't notice much if any funtional difference.

What is ARS? Maybe in the PeeCee world it boots slowly. That's because you are still crippled by that braindamaged BIOS mentality.

I have 15Krpm 320MB SCSI drives. I'll take them over your SATA 150Mb drives any day.

RAID is useful and easy to set up since it comes with many low cost, but not cheap, motherboards. However, if there is another automatic backup system, that doesn't require you to change tapes in and out, for instance, then I'd like to hear of it. (Really, I would! I want to put that into my next home-brew.) Of course, to be useful, it has to be something available on a Mac system (which I don't think he's building), unix, or windows. And yes, I know, windows sux.

Too many people don't.

What exactly is wrong with mirroring? It may not be a speedy thing but it gives you an instant replacement drive if the first fails. And with the cost of drives these days, it's easy to get a replacement. Just make sure you buy a popular and quality drive when you start.

For the purpose you have described, not much save for the fact that there is typically no redundancy to the RAID system. A real OS wouldn't been to rely on a separate and autonomous bit of hardware to do a relatvely simple task of cloning I/O requests. There isn't a single mirroring solution where you can pull one of the members from the set and install it in the system referencing it as a local/standalone drive (save for one OS...wonder what that might be). So when the RAID controller decides to abandon its ghost and head south, where does that leave your data? Personally, I prefer less hardware solutions. Hardware breaks. Why throw a slew of hardware at a problem that simple software can solve. Of course, if your OS can't do a real asynchronous I/O you're SOL and stuck with a hardware hack.

However, I am sick and tired of it being touted as a DR solution. You still have single point of failure. Read this link... pay attention to the section titled "State Of The Art".

http://www.computerworld.com/securit...1249p3,00.html

Anyway, this geekery is beyond the subject of this thread.

Respectfully, (VAX who ported VMS Host Based Volume Shadowing driver to Alpha circa '93 while M$ was still mucking with DOS)