A note about SCSI vs IDE... I have recently tried both on a dual P3 with
1gb of ram running Mandrake 7.2. I was amazed the idle CPU's were
running near 20-23% with nothing other then a bash shell running on 2
IBM IDE ATA 100 drives. I converted to 2 IBM SCSI U2 drives and the idle
CPU's went down to 0-2%. This was a tremendous difference. I feel SCSI
is a must.
I would like to try one of those new Promise Supertrak ATA 100 RAID 5
cards or hear from someone who has tried one... Anyone? I read they have
the same onboard CPU as the Adaptec ultra160 RAID 5 card and can have up
to twice as much onboard cache (128mb) as the SCSI counterpart. It is
true hardware level raid 5 with a hot spare and each of the up to 6
drives is on its own interface. I would think this would alleviate the
onboard IDE / CPU burn and improve the IDE performance tremendously.
The cost of the Promise Supertrak is over $100 more than the Adaptec
ultra 160 card, but the ATA 100 drives are very inexpensive compared to
SCSI. I found that you could get more than 4x the space for 25% less
money with IDE ATA 100 RAID 5.
If this is true... IDE RAID 5 might be a good alternative to SCSI.
As for the Intel vs Sparc, well I use both. The Intel's are great when
you need Windows but when you need performance the Intel just can't keep
up with the stability, raw power or speed of Solaris 8 on a Sun machine.
As for the cost, we use HP dual 700 CPU x86 Netservers which cost about
$30,000ea and with the Sun Developer program we saved 40% on our Sun
machines which put the Sun E220 dual CPU in the same ballpark only it
will run circles around the HP and I think anyone who develops with Java
can become a Sun Developer.
Steve Ackerman
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