What do you use?

Jason Bacon jbacon at mcw.edu
Fri Jan 2 13:05:12 PST 2004


On Friday 02 January 2004 07:19 am, Francisco Reyes wrote:
> On Fri, 2 Jan 2004, Jason Bacon wrote:
> > Well, I'm in a position to provide some comparison data with not-too-many
> > variables,
>
> Thanks much for sharing the results.
>
> They seem close enough that someone who is price concious or on a limited
> budget may want to consider the 3Ware.
>
> However, what a test like that may not show well is the difference when
> having multi-user access. I think on that case the SCSI disks may do
> better.

Actually, I think the test *does* show that.  It clearly showed that the SCSI 
system was somewhat less impacted by RAID access.  Hence it would follow that 
the SCSI system could handle a somewhat heavier load before seeing a 
performance drop.  The choice would depend how much the extra bandwidth is 
worth to you, assuming your usage patterns could make use of it at times.

I can tell you that our users have never complained about performance of the 
server.  We have relatively few users (1-10 at a time) running fairly intense 
data analysis (on the order of 1 hour total CPU time + processing gigabytes 
of 3d brain images ) either running on the server or over NFS.

If you're wondering how they perform under heavy process loads, note that 
Yahoo is using the 3ware controllers extensively.  Maybe they'd be willing to 
share their experience...

Regards,

	Jason


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