[rescue] Sun Blade 100 Question - IDE

[rescue at sunhelp.org]

> It looks like the Blade 100 has two IDE channels, with the 
> primary channel going to the default hard drive and the
> secondary channel going to the CD-ROM. If you add a second
> hard drive, which channel does Sun put it on?
The answer from everything I've seen/heard is that if you
want a second hard drive Sun recommends you buy a system
that will support SCSI.

If the CD-ROM is rarely used, then it probably makes sense to
put the second hard drive on the second IDE channel.  (When we
added second hard drives to our U5s, most of them got the
second hard drive as slave on the first IDE channel--because
the point of having a second drive wasn't to use both at the
same time, but to dual boot for testing of different OS/software
environments.  Cabling was easier if both IDE HDs went on the
same channel.)

> I ask because I'm trying to evaluate what kind of performance 
> hit one would take by configuring hardware RAID on these boxes.
I think you mean software IDE raid (0 or 1).  I would expect
that the performance hit would not be notable to the average
observer unless you're really pounding on these systems,
regardless of whether you're using RAID 0 or 1, and either both
drives on one channel or each drive on its "own" channel.

If you're really concerned about performance, an SB100 is
not the right system to be starting with.  Not that it's bad
as a starting point, but it's just not designed for expansion
or for high performance--it's a decent/less-expensive desktop
workstation.

  --Rip