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Bob Keyes wrote: > Now that the reason for the number of drives was explained to me, it makes > sense. I may be able to use software RAID on a low-end system after all. > But for some reason, SCSI doesn't have a lot of respect around this > office. Just to be clear: I am not recommending that you consider SCSI; I am recommending taking a look at (parallel) IDE vs. serial ATA, and at software vs. hardware RAID. The price premium for SCSI is rarely worth it, only in high-end systems built with it. Or in obsolescent systems that you inherited from someone else. (But don't use hard drives older than about 5 years, when manufacturers finally figured out how to make them truly durable.) You can easily build a 4-drive IDE configuration with software RAID1, 600 gigs usable, by getting the cheapest 300Gb drives on the market. A RAID5 configuration would give you 900 gigs using the same 4 300Gb drives. I don't know too many environments where you really need that much data. One other comment I should make about a typical corporate installation: high capacity filesystems make people lazy about cleaning out old data. Most companies should throw out 99% of the junk they've accumulated. But they don't bother because hard drives are cheap. But if folks don't clean out the crap, there is a cost to consider: backups. Tape drives are nowhere near as cheap as disks, and handling large backup libraries is a time-consuming administrative hassle. -rich
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