[tech] v6

[Adrian Chadd]

On Wed, May 28, 2003, Grahame Bowland wrote:

> > Why would you want to?
> 
> Another example of something we could do cheap and well by going down 
> the PC path is /home. For a few hundred dollars a couple of 120Gb 
> ATA100 drives could be purchased. These could then be mirrored, whacked 
> into a Linux / BSD / Solaris x86 machine with a decent ATA100 card. 
> They would /massively outperform/ morwong's disks.

_yay_.

> These days, ATA really isn't that bad. Yes, you will get more
> interrupts than on SCSI. However, in real life it's still going to be
> faster than the ancient disks in morwong. In real life, it's going to be
> massively cheaper. IDE disks are far easier to replace : if one of the
> bricks in morwong goes along with all the disks, it'd cost a mint to get
> the thing up and working again.

In fact, you could write in yearly replacements of one of the disks
and I'm sure we'd still end up with great uptime.

> So, I'd like to propose that we get something recent (P3 or greater)
> from somewhere, buy a decent ATA 100 controller for it (that is
> well-supported by Linux and/or BSD) and stick 2 * 120Gb 7200RPM
> Barracudas in it. Also give the host PC a couple of gigabytes of memory, 
> just to be on the safe side.
> 
> We would need to test NFS locking and things like that; it'd be nice 
> to get it working with Linux or BSD, but if necessary we could run 
> Solaris x86.

NFS locking definitely needs to be tested. Solaris x86 doesn't suck but
its quite picky about its high-perf x86 hardware.

I second this.




Adrian