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Derek D. Martin writes: > You could just mirror the disk. For most people, that's probably > the easiest and cheapest way to go, once you get past figuring out > how to make a disk mirror. But then, there are nice how-tos that > tell you exactly what to do... I guess you're talking about RAID 1 here? I'm thinking about that for my next machine. Here's what I had in mind: Adaptec 29160 SCSI controller two IBM 36 GB U-160 10k rpm hard drives, in software RAID 1 Tyan S2466N-4M MPX motherboard With software RAID, I recognize that write performance may be somewhat poorer than with a single disk. However, I'm hoping read performance will be quite a bit better. Here's my analysis: The Ultra160 SCSI bus has a bandwidth of 160 MB/sec, which is more than twice the sustained transfer rate of a single disk (29-57 MB/sec). The Adaptec card uses a 64 bit PCI bus, and the motherboard supports 66 MHz on its 64 bit PCI slots. Does that translate to 8*66=528 Mbytes/sec? If so, it seems I should get something like twice the data rate on reading as with a single disk. However, all the Software-RAID-HOWTO promises is "a noticeable performance improvement". Am I missing something? I'm also wondering how much noise those 10k RPM disks make. - Jim Van Zandt
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