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

[Tim H.]

On Fri, 23 Apr 2004 18:58:52 -0500 (CDT)
dittman at dittman.net (Eric Dittman) wrote:

> The problem with lumping all the controllers onto one card is you are
> going run into a problem with bandwidth.  If you only have two
> controllers on a card (which seems to be pretty common) then you are
> going to run into a problem with PCI slots.
> 
> I still can't believe that they went the wrong way with
> drives/controller.-- 
> Eric Dittman

I don't know, if SATA is intended to be a desktop drive format, given
the sizes of current affordable SATA drives, I'd say that two in a PC
desktop is fine.  SATA wasn't targetted as server hardware was it? (I
really don't know that) Most small servers I have seen do fine with
Ultra320 SCSI, and yeah, fast FC controllers can be a little pricey, but
then so are good servers of any brand.  I think SATA for Hard drives and
regular UDMA IDE for the various removable media drives is fine for a PC
desktop.

If your server is smaller than justifies Ultra320, well, fine, then
don't buy a new box.  A good caching Ultra2 SCSI controller isn't all
that pricey, and you can probably even find an AlphaServer 800 or
something with hot swap bays for cheap in that category.

Of course if you make the distinction between desktop and workstation
(which is completely valid) I think the same rules apply.  The
difference there is of course it may be faster to put the storage on the
server anyway, and just put fast network in the workstation.  No, I am
not going to opine on fast network, I believe that thread is running
elsewhere on this list :-)

However, on that topic, is CDDI just copper FDDI?  Same speed, token
handling, etc?  Are they basically just different media modules in the
same switches?  If so, are there media converters?

Tim