I am planning on getting THIS mainboard soon and have my eyes set on buying two of THESE sets of registered Kingston Ram, I just need some opinions on whether or not this is a good combination of mainboard and ram. When you click the link to the mainboard I have chosen you will see two mainboards the one I want is the higher priced of the two { $355.99 }
just curious as to the reason that is your motherboard of choice? im hoping you plan on using the onboard U320 controller
That is why I chose this mainboard, so that I can use the onboard SCSI which I find to be a lot more efficient at transfering data. I will be using 4 of the biggest 15,000RPM SCSI drives that I can find in a 0+1 Raid array.
phew, thats ok then, i have a mate that nearly bought something similar because it was the most expensive by far so he thought it would be the fastest, until i informed him that he would never use the scsi you probably cant go far wrong with that board as i think it is the only P4 desktop board with integrated scsi, i was lookign a while back for a 478 board with either pcix or onboard scsi and this was all i found. though im not sure what bus it is on, if it is just on the pci bus then you will get a serious bottleneck running 4 15k drives (may i recommend fujitsu MAS) also, i think that it is a chopped down scsi, like you can only have a couple devces per channel (mind you irrelevant if you are only using 4 drives) you may be better off spending a bit more on a sperate scsi controller, like an adaptec 19320r, and using raid3 or raid5, as you could have 50% more bandwidth and 50% more speed at least, over a raid0+1, and you would have the advantage of hardware raid instead of software
Could you give me a link to that **fujitsu MAS** that you mentioned? Raid 0+1 = Striped and mirrored = requires 4 drives
raid1+0 does indeed require 4 drives, but raid3 only needs one drive for parity information so the other 3 are left for storage and bandwidth, raid5 spreads the parity info over all of the drives so you have 4x drives of bandwidth and most of the storage space so you can get the same performance of a raid0+1 with only 3 drives in a raid3 or raid5 raid0+1 is very waseful of both bandwidth and space www.storagereview.com is a very good site for checking out that sort of stuff, they have reviews of all teh current generation 15k drives in detail, the MAS is currently on top of the leaderboard
100%, just as good as mirroring but is more efficient you can have umlimited drives in theory and only need 1 for parity information to have everything backed up i can go into the technicalities of it if you want
okeydokey for teh sake of simpicity pretend i have 3 hard drives with an 8 BIT (i know, huge) capacity, informations is stored on 3 of the drives, striped, so no redundancy yet Code: drive1 drive2 drive3 drive4(parity) 0 1 1 1 0 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 the parity inforamtion is stored on drive number 4 so that every row of bits is Even, this means that if any one drive fails, the inforamtion on that drive can be recalculated by using the parity information of the last drive and the information on all the other drives. this would be the drives with the parity information included Code: drive1 drive2 drive3 drive4(parity) 0 1 1 0 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 so now each "line" of bits has an even number of 1s in it so if any drive dies, the inforamtion on that drive can be calculated by checking if the line has an even or odd number of bits on it already, if the number is even then a '0' is the missing inforamtion and if it is odd then a '1' is the missing information it is a bit more complicated than that but that is the basic concept of raid3 raid5 is when a bit of the parity information is held on each of the drives
I'll just add that using a raid array is no excuse for not doing a hard backup... if you get power surged, you still lose all of your data
not necessarily bigz is right, you should always have hard backups of the stuff you *really* cant lose, whether it be on a CD or tape drive or just on a hard drive that isnt in use.
