ethernet and switches, was Re: [rescue] Mozilla Firefox

[Patrick Finnegan]

On Friday 23 April 2004 18:08, Eric Dittman wrote:
> Most big companies use some kind of FC SAN.  If you buy stuff off
> eBay FC is also affordable for home since FC disks seem to be
> inexpensive. The only thing you'd need would be a FC backplane (or
> use T-cards) to connect the drives.

FC generally sucks, due to its lack of standardiztion.  It's easy to 
find gear, switches, and enclosures/drives that don't work together, 
although this should be getting better.

I managed to pick up 4.8TB of FC storage + another 1.4TB for my S/390 
for $2700 just recently.  That's $0.43/GB.  Not too bad (although it's 
fairly large/power hungry, being a total of 5 racks in size: 2 for the 
FC and 3 for the S/390 (EMC) system).

> The new SATA and serial SCSI look interesting since SATA uses the
> SCSI command set (and IIRC can be connected to serial SCSI
> controllers, but I could have that backwards).  The only drawback
> with SATA is the one drive/controller limit.

Well, you can't put more than one drive on a cable.  You can certainly 
have more than one drive on a card, although anything more than a 4 
drive card costs way too much.  Yes, I realize you said "controller", 
but most people would take that to mean "controller card". :)

For the money and reliability and expandability (but not power usage), 
I'd go with used FC gear.

Pat
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