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Henry Hartley wrote:
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cite="mid403593359CA56C4CAE1F8F4F00DCFE7D07E20057@MAILBE2.westat.com"
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<pre wrap="">Terrell Prudé Jr. wrote:
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<pre wrap="">I'd agree with the above; SCSI, if you can afford it, is always
better.
However, if cost constraints are an issue (and I've seen plenty
of situations in which that's the case), I've actually used PATA
for a 25-student lab. Yes, EIDE. One disk. And nobody
complained. Granted, it was an update from the Windows 98 that
they were using, on Dell Optiplex GX1's, so the speed increase
by going with K12LTSP was heartily welcomed, but if things were
"slow", I would've heard about it (it's a Microsoft shop).
Therefore, I'd suspect that a hardware RAID using SATA would be
just fine for 35 students.
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<pre wrap=""><!---->
What about a "middle course" of a SAS controller with SATA drives? It seems that would be an improvement over Plain Old SATA for not too much extra cash. Still not as good or as expensive as SCSI. Is that correct?
For instance, what do you think of this controller with four SATA drives in a RAID 5 or RAID 10 configuration? Controller and four 250GB drives (750GB as RAID 5, 500GB as RAID 10) would cost in the ballpark of $450, which seems pretty attractive.
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816118086">http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816118086</a>
The difference in drive price between SATA and ATA100 or ATA133 seems pretty negligible so it's really just the cost of the controller.
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<br>
That actually does look quite attractive. I'm about to build a SATA
array using an LSI Logic controller. Matter of fact, I have a
preference for LSI Logic controllers, due to the fact that they publish
their chip programming specs without NDA. We've got a few Sun v20z and
v40z boxes that use the MegaRAID SCSI cards, and they work very nicely.<br>
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