[rescue] tape drive with no SCSI

Patrick Giagnocavo rescue at sunhelp.org
Thu Nov 8 01:59:56 CST 2001


"Michael C. Vergallen" wrote:
> 
> On 8 Nov 2001, Phil Brutsche wrote:
> 
> > I've noticed that SCSI drastically increases the cost of the system
> > without necessarily increasing performance.  It all depends on your
> > workload.
> I don't know about that...I'd never run a server or my own workstation(s)
> on IDE, because I've had bad experiences with IDE.

Early IDE was crappy.  There can be no disagreement on that.
 
> > If you were running a high-volume mail server you'd probably notice.
> Or any server that runs a lot of background stuff and gets accessed by
> multiple users at a time for example Oracle databases, graphical work
> etc.

The thing is, from a purely practical matter, that RAM is so cheap these
days that you can cache a lot.  I run a lot of PostgreSQL on one of my
servers, 5 different databases (equiv to tablespaces in Oracle), with
about 6 connections each (that is, up to 30 backends), and haven't
noticed too much of a problem, precisely because the box has 256MB RAM.  

Absolute throughput on SCSI is probably better, certainly better when
you add more spindles.  

BTW a little birdie told me that 10,000 RPM IDE drives will be shipping
soon.

./patrick



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