SCSI for OS and IDE for storage

felkin · 12-02-2003, 12:03 PM

I was wondering if, performance wise, having a mix of both SCSI and IDE is worth while. I have one SCSI drive (9 GB) which the Linux OS, mySQL (for a music database) and Apache running php are installed on. The other drive is IDE (160 GB) for storage of music and movies. Is there any benefit to this?

If there is a benefit to this set up, I was thinking of adding another 9 GB SCSI and 160 GB IDE and making two RAID 0 's. This would give me more space and performance which I need for both apache and music storage. (I don't really care to much at this point for data safety in the RAID.)

Please tell me if this is a dumb idea. Maybe I should just switch to IDE completely and make my RAID 0 with 3 IDE drives instead?

Thanx for the input

-Rob

btw I'm not rich and can't just buy a bunch of SCSI drives.

hw-tph · 12-02-2003, 12:31 PM

I am fond of SCSI drives, for the extra punch of performance they provide. I prefer using a setup similar to yours with SCSI disks for system, swap and essential daemons, while using affordable and large IDE drives for storage. I see no problem with that setup, and if you want to do two LVM/RAIDs, by all means go ahead!

Håkan

cetialphav · 12-02-2003, 09:29 PM

Since I have both SCSI and IDE in my system, I guess I should throw my two cents in. I can't tell the difference. The newer generation of IDE drives can be quite fast, and I just don't see a performance hit when using IDE vs SCSI. This is with kernel compiling, ripping MP3/OGG, etc.

SCSI is great for lots of things, but in a desktop machine I say save some money and go IDE. The marginal improvement you may get on a benchmark is not worth the money. Note: I did not pay for my SCSI drives; they, uh, fell off a truck.

finegan · 12-03-2003, 05:57 AM

SCSI 9.1s are pretty cheap these days, even UWs that can handle 80MB/sec read-write. A nice 10k is pretty badass, two of them in raid 0, now that's just fun. Nah, that's not a stupid idea at all, drive writes can be a bottleneck like anything else and in the IDE world the goal has always been space over speed so that's where you take a hit. My whopping 160Gb Raid 5 array isn't all that fast, about 33Mb/sec. I would love to swap it down to a 76Gb SCSI raid 5 array.

Its a good idea, really...

Cheers,

Finegan