Topic: Recommended Hard Drives?

[Steve]

What are the best hard drives for speed  (SCSI or IDE)?  I want to use e-smith with SquidGuard and have maximum network throughput.  How hard are SCSI HD's (using SCSI controllers) to use with e-smith?  I appreciate any suggestions!

Thanks,

Steve

[OC]

Steve,
The debate will go on for years to come - IDE or SCSI? I have used e-smith from it early days, to current releases. I have always used SCSI drives. Controllers used are DIAMOND FIREPORT40, and ADAPTEC 2940U & 2940W. My drive of choice are SEGATE ST423451W - Yes - the full-height big-iron type. Why? Because they will run forever. I have client servers running for more than 18 months non-stop.
My issue is not IDE performance, but IDE failure rates. But that is personal experience.

Hope this helps

OC
Network Engineer

[dave]

If you were to compare IDE and SCSI, side by side in a high end server multi user heavy load situation, SCSI will always win - it'll always be the most expensive too.  

Think of IDE as consumer grade hardware and SCSI as commercial.  

For single user situations, IDE is fine and can out do some SCSI drives but for server situations, I'd always go with an advanced SCSI interface.  I'm a small time user and I don't have alot of $$$ to spend on hardware but I've found you can still have a good system with high reliability pretty cheap.  Drives like OC describes are real cheap and less than latest technology RAID cards are even cheaper.

If you want ultimate performance, there many high end SCSI cards capable of 160Mbs through put and high end SCSI drives that spin at better than 12,000 RPM.  You can stripe these drives and get much better performance out of a striped array (using hardware raid) than a single drive.

[dave]

Forgot to answer your second question....

I use hardware RAID cards.  Set the array up first, it makes the array look like a single drive.  Then install SME choosing the 'install to single drive' option.  

There are exceptions to this, SME can see through some SCSI RAID cards to the individual drives.  I've tried a Adaptec 131U2 and a DPT RAID card.  After configuring the array, I install SME and SME see's the individual drives - this is NOT the goal.  Right now, I use older (and really cheap) compaq raid cards, the 2/P or 2/DH are excellent cards.  They're a pain to set up in a non compaq server but worth the effort.

If you don't go with a RAID card, get a good performance UW SCSI card (the 2940UW is a very good one).  SME can software mirror 2 SCSI drives in this configuration just like it can mirror 2 IDE drives.

[Steve]

Thanks for the feedback!  I think that will be a great help.  Do the SCSI drives function pretty similar in Linux (other than the device name) as far as formatting and partitioning is concerned?

Thanks again,

Steve

[Andy MacDonald]

Identical.

[dave]

As far as I can see, they are treated the same.  I've installed SME in several setups using both IDE and SCSI drives and also with RAID arrays.  SME can do software mirroring of two identical drives and that's better than having no redundancy but I would still recommend hardware RAID.  

The comments I made about some RAID cards not working properly with SME are very likely a configuration error on my part.  That doesn't mean the cards didn't work, only that they didn't work the way I wanted them to.

Don't discount older SCSI drives either, I've picked up sevaral with resonable capacities (47GIG) really cheap.  And you can take several lesser capability drives, configure a striped or RAID5 array and be able to exceed the throughput of a single very high performance drive.  The more drives in the array the better performance the overall array will provide (up to a point).