Hardware Recommendations for LTSP

Warren Togami warren at togami.com
Wed May 9 20:19:17 PDT 2001


----- Original Message -----
From: "Steve" <steve at iwsys.com>
To: "Linux & Unix Advocates & Users" <luau at list.luau.hi.net>
Sent: Wednesday, May 09, 2001 2:26 PM
Subject: [luau] Re: Hardware Recommendations for LTSP


> Are you sure the cost savings over SCSI RAID are _really_ there?  How much
> mass storage do you need?  I bought 15 18GB U160 scsi drives on ebay for
> $130ea and then got a 64bit PCI AMI MegaRAID Elite 1600 for $350.  The
nice

How often can you find that kind of great deal?  We can't survive off of
Ebay for a steady stream of parts, when we need to make many of these
systems.  Also we probably can't buy parts on Ebay with the DOE's bid and
procurement laws.

I suppose I should look at SCSI choices...

> RAID 5 does nothing to improve performance.  It has to do a parity
> calculation and there is some overhead in this.  SCSI RAID off loads this
> to the RAID controller CPU.  I would think the cache on the controller
> would probably offset this loss.  The memory interleaving of the AMI
> controllers would probably go even further to offsetting that.  One last
> benefit of the SCSI solution is the MegaRAID driver is very well developed
> in linux.
>

Maybe I'm completely wrong about RAID 5.  Anyway, I'm going to try it.
Anyone have anything against RAID 0 + 1?



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