[rescue] Apple Announces Rackmount Server - WITH IDEHARDWARE RAID

[Phil Schilling]

"Greg A. Woods" wrote:

> 
> 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


This thread per ide vs scsi is inane.

IDE - cheap single threaded workstation use only
SCSI - expensive multi-threaded high bandwith

As the simple example that I give clients when discussing the differences and
justifying the price of SCSI

If you have a 100 animals that you need to move to another pen do you want to
funnel them through 1 gate or would it be more efficient and faster to funnel
them through many gates.

Oversimplified but I am tired and really pissed over the half information in
comparison of the two.

IDE - Workstation only
SCSI - High End Workstation and Servers

23 years of this profession and have never installed or maintained a IDE based
server and have no intention of ever doing so.

Phil
-- 
"I talk to myself, and when I do that, I know I am talking to an
           intelligent person" - Nelson DeMille

        Phil Schilling - GCS Tech - phils at gcstech.net