[rescue] Apple Announces Rackmount Server - WITH IDE HARDWARE RAID

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On , May 15, 2002 at 09:56:23 (-0700), Gregory Leblanc wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [rescue] Apple Announces Rackmount Server - WITH IDE   HARDWARE RAID
>
> Ever tried to find an IDE drive with a 10 year warranty?  

Why would I want a 10-year warranty on a drive for a box with a three
warranty?  :-)

> IDE is certainly going to be cheaper, but I'd be willing to bet that you
> could put together an U160 SCSI setup with only 4 drives that would
> knock the socks off of this thing in terms of access speed and data
> throughput, just based on having faster drives available.  

I'd be willing to bet two things:  a) you couldn't meet their specs; and
b) that you couldn't even come close to doing so at even twice same cost.

To quote from the "storage" page:

	Apple Drive Modules use 7200rpm ATA/100 hard disk drives. Each
	drive has an independent Ultra ATA/100 bus, an arrangement that
	allows maximum individual drive performance without choking the
	throughput of the other drives. The ATA drive subsystem has a
	high-bandwidth I/O bus that minimizes bottlenecks, even when all
	four drives are engaged at once. That's how Xserve can achieve a
	theoretical peak performance of up to 266 megabytes per second,
	compared to a 160MB/s theoretical performance with SCSI Ultra160
	disk drives - at a significantly lower cost, and while
	generating less heat than SCSI drives.

In other words you'd need to add a pair of AIC-7892 chips or equivalent
onboard, and put them on their own separate direct system controller
attached PCI bus, to do what they're doing.

Or are you willing to pay for UltraSCSI-320 already?  :-)

I'm simply amazed that they managed to get hot-swap to work with ATA/100
and SCA-II connectors (and I hope nobody ever tries to direct-plug any
SCSI drive with an SCA-II connector into the damn thing! :-).

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098;  <gwoods at acm.org>;  <g.a.woods at ieee.org>;  <woods at robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods at planix.com>; VE3TCP; Secrets of the Weird <woods at weird.com>