how to best use SCSI and IDE?

[mcveigh]

I'm building a new file /print server. I was planning on using an IDE drive for the OS
and the SCSI (in a raid1) for the shared files. My thinking being that the flies themselves would see the most use and requests.
But after reading some posts recently some indicate this would be a bad idea, maybe even doing it backwards, with the OS on the SCSI and the files on IDE.
Could anyone share some input?

 

[Lord Evermore]

Unless this is going to be some REALLY high usage, there's really no reason to use SCSI at all. An ATA66 or ATA100 drive will perform perfectly well for home file sharing/serving. SCSI would only be useful if you were planning on using more than 4 drives, and even then, an extra ATA100 adapter might still be cheaper.

 

[Radboy]

Perhaps you should post at the Storagereview. I've seen a few similar threads there. They love questions like this.

 

[mcveigh]

This network will have about 15-20 users accesing the net, opening word, and excel spread sheets and of course printing.
At one time there are no more than 10 people on the network. will IDE still be fast enough under those circumstances?

 

[goldboyd]

DEFINATELY go scsi. ide absolutely blows in any kind of sever environment. if you can afford it go all scsi, and raid 1, as you said for fault tolerence.

 

[Lord Evermore]

Is this going to be a work environment?

Is it serving the applications or JUST data files? (I.e., is Office installed in a single directory on this server and each user runs the executable from that drive, or does each workstation have its own copy of Office and they just load the data files from it?)

Unless it's going to be getting constant hits from users loading large data files, I still think ATA100 would be a better value, as you can get much larger drives for a lower price, and even go with an IDE RAID controller and get very good performance out of it.

 

[Modus]

goldboyd,

<<DEFINATELY go scsi. ide absolutely blows in any kind of sever environment>>

This is a common misconception. Evermore is correct.

With seek times under 9 ms and rotational speeds of 7200 rpm, modern IDE drives provide excellent performance at an extremely low cost. For all but the most demanding corporate server environments, SCSI's limitted performance gains cannot justify its siginificant added investment. Certainly performance home desktops will not see performance gains in line with SCSI's added cost.

And a closer look at the typical access pattern of a small to medium sized network server (say 50 users or less) will show you that the majority of frequently-used data ends up stored by the OS's disk cache. So investing in more RAM or a faster processor tends to yield more apparent performance benefits in read worl usage.

Modus

 

[mcveigh]

It sounds Like IDE may be the way to go. at our office the most commonly used files are some excel templates and form letters. nothing large.

Evermore I'm curious as to how I could run an executable across the network. That would come in handy with my laptop. Where Would I start to do something like that? (sorry for getting sidetracked)

Seth

 

[Lord Evermore]

A network installation. I'm not sure how it would be done though. Most applications require some Registry data to point them to where the needed files and DLL's are, but many corporations use apps stored on a server and all you do is have a shortcut to the executable on the network drive.

 

[mcveigh]

HMM maybe a way to get around those damn MS licensing agreements?

 

[kyoshozx]

One thing you forgot is growth. Are you absolutely sure that in a year or 2 you'll still have only 15-20 users? Scsi can handle more drives than ide controllers can. So in the future if you ever need to upgrade you can always add more drives.

Scsi drives are suppose to be more reliable. One other factor that everyone leaves out is that scsi drives multitasks better, which is extemely important in a server environment.


<<DEFINATELY go scsi. ide absolutely blows in any kind of sever environment>>

&quot;This is a common misconception. Evermore is correct.&quot;

This is not really a misconception, depending on the setup scsi can definately have a MAJOR advantage. I agree with you the cost is insane, but we're talking about a server here, and most people are willing to spend more to squeeze out as much performance they can.

I think the real misconception is that people think scsi drives in general outperform a simliar ide drive. But in reality they perform about the same. For example a 7200rpm scsi drive will perform about the same as a 7200ide drive. It's just that scsi usually have the latest technologies in there drives, like a 15k rpm scsi drive, while the fastest ide drive is still spinning at 7200rpm.

In your Case Mcveigh, I would lean more towards IDE if you want to save money.

 

[mcveigh]

Thank you everyone you have been a great help.
We are actually trying to downsize a little, and expect little growth in the next few years.
I will probably go with IDE for the cost and if I feel I need to expand I can always switch over to SCSI w/o losing much dinero$ I feel the server will not be taxed much at all. A bigger project down the road for us would be handling our own web hosting. but in that case I would have a separate system for securities sake.

cheers,
seth

 

[rahvin]

Your really want RAID 5 in a server environment, it's striping with parity. You lose one drive and all drives have to be the same size but it kicks butt.

 

[kombatmud]

If you can afford SCSI, get it. Otherwise, go with IDE RAID. If you decide to do a mix, you should have the SCSI drive as the main system drive, and the IDE as the storage, until you expand and replace the IDE with SCSI, and then after that, more SCSI =).