I was going to make a long entry discussing the advantages and disadvantages of various computer storage types, specifically related to RAID arrays. Unfortunately, it got really long-winded and incomprehensible.
To summarize, though:
If you want a blazing fast RAID and don't mind having all of the drives in your main computer case, IDE (or Serial ATA) with a good hardware RAID controller can't be beat. If you get huge drives, you can even pull off arrays that measure a few terabytes in size. I can't say I'd recommend doing software IDE RAID, though maybe I'm just biased..
For external storage, FireWire and USB are easy to do, but daisy-chaining lots of little enclosures together is not my idea of fun, and the speed leaves something to be desired. For not too much more money, you could probably jump to 1Gbps FibreChannel—the disks are cheap, though there are other costs. Doing more than a few drives with FibreChannel will probably require you to go to a rackmount array, which can be a big chunk of change, though they seem to be getting pretty cheap on eBay.
I did this, though I've sort of gotten burned with bad disks. 3 out of 5 of some I purchased last year appear to be dead or mostly dead. Still, FibreChannel drives remain cheap—it looks like I might be able to get some new 36 GB drives for $10-30 (not too bad).
SCSI is not something I really recommend. It has nice performance, and you can make your own external RAID box without much trouble (hell, you don't even need a box—just a cable and power). The problem is that the drives cost 3-4 times what you'd pay for IDE or FibreChannel (well, on eBay) This clobbers the price of other technologies (except probably 2Gbps FibreChannel).
Of course, for all of these, if you want to maximize your throughput, you'll need a “workstation” or “server” motherboard with fast PCI slots. Most of these arrays I'm talking about (the probable exceptions being FireWire and USB2) will completely flood your computer's 32-bit 33 MHz PCI bus. Better motherboards can do 64-bit 66 MHz or even 133 MHz. A fortunate few “slow” motherboards may already have integrated IDE or SCSI RAID controllers that already run at faster speeds.
Posted by mike at June 3, 2003 02:15 AM | Hardware | TrackBack