Quote:
Originally posted by mtsgsd
Another note about the RAID. There really isn't that much advantage to going SCSI anymore except in one area. If you need a lot of drives hooked up, or hooked up in a separate box, you have to go scsi since IDE is limited to 2 devices per port, and 18" max cable length (and yet vendors sell 24" cables  ).
IDE is just about as fast, and a whole lot cheaper. 3rd party RAID cards can give you the ability to stripe more drives than what you'd be limited to with an onboard controller, and you have the ability to swap it out later if it breaks or becomes obsolete. Serial ATA is the next big thing, and will give you the daisy chaining ability of SCSI, but it's very new and expensive. Not to mention hard to find.
|
Bzzzt...*WRONG*
IDE drives and controllers max out at 133MB/sec; even SATA only does 150MB/sec. Currently shipping SCSI gear does 160 and 320mb/sec. Mind, these are maximum -burst- speeds between controller and disk only. The difference is
truly realized when you consider that IDE I/O uses more CPU time/system resources than SCSI to get the same amount of work done.
SATA controllers do not support daisy-chained devices; one drive per cable only. The same goes for most IDE (now also being called "Parallel ATA") RAID solutions, such as 3Ware & Promise.
The only reason to choose an IDE or SATA RAID solution over SCSI is not being able to afford the higher price that better technology is
well worth.
Most of the IDE/SATA hard disks on the market are consumer-grade mechanisms; most of the SCSI disks are designed and engineered to work in more demanding environments. They will last longer and can better handle higher workloads.
(I -am- quite anxious to check out WD's new Raptor 360 disk, because it is being touted as the first legitimate server-grade SATA mechanism...)
Back to the topic at hand...for this Quad Xeon solution...
Retail, you should expect to pay something in the range of
4000-4500 for an Intel SRSH4 'Shasta' base unit, see link 1 below
1500-6000 for -EACH- CPU
1000-1500 for the memory
500-600 for the disks.
Also, Xeon MP CPU's presently only go up to 2.0 GHz, unlike the DP which go up to 3.06...see link 2.
Link 1:
http://www.intel.com/cd/channel/rese...iefs/44739.htm
Link 2:
http://www.intel.com/cd/channel/rese.../faq/35968.htm