One of the things I keep idly thinking about, but never actually
trying, is to build a box with 4+ IDE drives and RAID 0/1. (Then I
would run Debian Linux and ReiserFS on it, and plug it into a decent
UPS, but none of that matters for this discussion.)
A
Seagate 40 GB IDE drive
costs $100. An
IBM 36 GB SCSI drive
is $400.
Now, I'm sure the SCSI is a much better drive, but 4x better? Am I
really better off spending $400 on a single 36 GB SCSI drive, rather
than buying four IDE drives, running RAID 0 or 0/1, and
getting 80 GB of storage, all for my same $400? Somehow I doubt it.
But I don't really know. People just say "SCSI is better", and I've
never seen numbers showing me just how much better, which is
what I'd need to understand the cost/benefit ratios of the different
options.
Also, there are
motherboards
with integrated "hardware" RAID 0/1 on them, which typically seem to
use a High Point HPT370 IDE Controller chip. But, they all seem to
also require "drivers" to use the RAID, which makes me confused as to
just how "hardware" the RAID really is. Then there are the lower cost
IDE RAID PCI cards which often seem to use the same High Point
controller chip, but two of them instead of one. And finally there's
always the option of just using software RAID. However, in my idle
web browsing I've not stumbled across any good information by which to
objectively evaluate these different options.
So if anybody knows about this stuff, I'm all ears. Post away. :)
