On Sun, 28 Mar 2004 17:28:52 +0000, Povl H. Pedersen wrote:

In article , General Schvantzkoph wrote:
On Sat, 27 Mar 2004 21:18:28 -0800, Brian wrote:

I want the fastest damn thing I can build for about 2k. Thinkin raptor74
disk a mobo and 1-2 cpus.

Spend the Raptor money on more RAM instead. Disk performance doesn't
matter for workstations and for file servers you are much better off
getting a 3Ware controller and multiple 7200 RPM disks rather than using
10,000 RPM disks which are much more expensive per megabyte.

Linux, Software RAID, FIC K8-800T, 2x160GB Seagate SATA, I can read/write
approx 110MByte/sec under Linuxc in RAID 0.

What are you doing that requires disk striping? Unless you are transfering
enormous amounts of data RAID 0 is a lose. For short files the access time
is completely dominated by rotational latency and seek time, transfer time
hardly enters into it. When you configure your system for RAID 0 what you
end up doing is making the access time of the file dependent on the piece
of the file that is farthest away from the heads. You also have to double
your block size which increases the amount of space that you waste when
fitting small files into large blocks. You are also doubling the chance
that a disk failure will wipe out your file system. If you are doing
something like video where the file sizes are huge then striping makes
sense. If you are doing anything else the only type of RAID that you want
to do is mirroring which will cost you performance but will dramamatically
reduce the chance of a catastrophic failure.