Are hardware vendors starting to bail on FreeBSD ... ?

[Francisco Reyes]

Nikolas Britton writes:

>> Dont get me wrong.. I can get approval to go SCSI since our
>> machines need at least 1T+ (the storage machines)

err.. should have say "can't get approval" to go SCSI.. We are using SATA.
  
 
> Why? 1TB and up is a SATA niche.

Correct.. that is what we use.

> You can buy 3 SATA arrays for the price of 1 SCSI array


Yup. SCSI drives are 3 to 5 times more expensive than SATA.

>.... Also... gigabit Ethernet is only 125MB/s
> (Max) and and a single SATA drive can easily transfer at 50MB/s*.

But RAID can possibly do more than 125MB/sec if doing large sequential 
files..

When I last tested on a 100Mb switch vs a 1000Mb switch, the performance 
difference in our case (rsyncing data from Maildir) was around 25% to 30% as 
measured over a week. And this is mostly lots and lots of small files. That 
tells me that even with SATA we are able to go over the 100Mb limit.
8 Disks in RAID 10, with 2 hot spares.


> limiting factor is probably going to be your bus with arrays/GigE so
> SCSI is pointless unless you can take advantage of SCSI's TCQ with
> high random access I/O loads

If we could afford it I still think SCSI would be usefull. It is not only 
about raw throughput, but how quickly you can get the data to the apps or 
to disk. Specially in a database or Maildir enviroment where there is lots 
of I/O going on.

> *I just tested this with two Maxtor SATA drives the other day:
> dd if=/dev/disk1 of=/dev/disk2 bs=4m. It dropped off to about 30MB/s
> at the end but my average read/write was just over 50MB/s.

But that is mostly sequential work.. I think for sequential work SATA is 
definitely the way to go.. is when you get into the random I/O that 
supposedly SCSI outshines SATA.