[geeks] Big Blue Smoke

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Fri, Apr 12, 2002 at 02:42:23AM +0000, Kris Kirby wrote:
> > I run parts of my business on IDE - but I also have redundant machines
> > and load balancers, as well as NAS.  If/when one of my servers dies,
> > nobody notices - and I can bring up a spare server in about 10 minutes
> > to take it's place.  Of course, these are *appliances*, and fast disk
> > I/O isn't necessary.
> 
> I'm not longer thrilled with IDE. I had a drive die and latch the bus, so
> drive #3 could not be reached. So much for fault tolerant filesystems.

It is fault tolerant... if you do it properly.  Properly means one drive per
bus.  So, if you want more than 3 hard drives and a CD-Rom, you are going
to need to add something like promise tech cards, one card for every two
additional harddrive.

Actually, it is tempting to get a IDE card for a PCI mac, and drop 2 mirrored
drives in it for offline non critical.  Sure, IDE sucks, but now everyone can
afford hundreds of gigs of SCSI space.

But, I'm not likely to do it anytime soon. 

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd