what size/speed combo to use for a dual SCSI system?
Hello -- I'm new here, and hoping to meet many of you soon! I want to multi-boot and play with three distros for a machine that would most likely always be a workstation, not a server. It would be for numerical work and not involve large or many audio or video files. It happens that the smaller the SCSI drive, the better the performance, and of course the smallest, fastest sizes available for SCSI are 18G and 32G. I'm planning to buy a matched pair of drives in order to spread the partitions for each distro across the two drives. Two questions: 1. I'd like to use use 2x18, but in your opinion, do I need 2x32? 2. Do you think 15000 rpm will be noticeably snappier than 10000 rpm? Thanks all, Brian 752-3033 anytime __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month! http://sbc.yahoo.com
On Saturday 04 October 2003 7:57 am, Brian McLinden wrote:
Hello -- I'm new here, and hoping to meet many of you soon!
I want to multi-boot and play with three distros for a machine that would most likely always be a workstation, not a server. It would be for numerical work and not involve large or many audio or video files.
It happens that the smaller the SCSI drive, the better the performance, and of course the smallest, fastest sizes available for SCSI are 18G and 32G.
I'm planning to buy a matched pair of drives in order to spread the partitions for each distro across the two drives.
Two questions:
1. I'd like to use use 2x18, but in your opinion, do I need 2x32?
HI Brian, I admire your zeal ! :-) I run SCSI drives in my systems at home. It is true that SCSI drives have better performance at higher cost relative to IDE. It is also true that a drive spinning at 10-15K rpms has an acoustic quality which my ears don't like. I don't think most people need 18 GB of disk space, but that's what is sold today. Folks who consume large amounts of disk space are typically saving alot of videos, mp3s, and pictures.
2. Do you think 15000 rpm will be noticeably snappier than 10000 rpm?
For your purposes, probably not. In a server environment with a large number of users, most definitely. Save a few bucks and get the U160 drives as they are trying to sell those off to make room for the (new) U320 drives. Your SCSI controller would be cheaper, too, if you did that. Later, Andy -- Andy Stewart, Founder Worcester Linux Users' Group Worcester, MA USA http://www.wlug.org
Brian, If you are just using this as a workstation the SCSI disks may be a bit of overkill. Don't get me wrong large reads will be fast but for the most part you will be working in a shell, vi/emacs, browsing the web, etc.. none of these operations are disk intensive. If you are interested in data integrity you could save your self a few hundred bucks and get 2 120GB IDE disks put them on different channels and use Linux to do a software mirror. RH9 will allow you to set this up at install time. If you are interested in general speed improvement I would look at bus and cpu clocks with a focus on the ram bus. It sounds like you have money to spend, you may also want to look at an SATA Intel 865 board. This board offers dual channel DDR RAM slots, SATA and regular ATA, go with the 3GHz HT cpu. Looks like any way you go you will have a screamer! Matt
participants (3)
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Andy Stewart -
Brian McLinden -
Matt Higgins