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

[David Robillard]

On 6/29/06, Joao Barros <joao.barros at gmail.com> wrote:

> > SAS drives are coming in strong. It's what all new machines will have
> > in the server market in upcoming years. Just take a look at new
> > machines from Sun, IBM and HP, they all switched to SAS drives.
> > They're great, really. But so far I've yet to see 15K rpm in 2,5" SAS
> > form factor.
>
>  I'm talking out of my mouth here but maybe the extra storage density
> used in SAS compensates for the lack of 15K rpm.

Well, there are two issues here: access time (rpm) and storage
capacity (GB). The access time deals with rotational speed of the
drives (rpm) while storage capacity (GB) does not care how fast the
drive spins.

The 15K rpm drives are nice to use when your application needs very
fast access to your storage. On a busy mail server or database for
instance. You won't need 15K rpm drives in a DNS server for example.

As for storage capacity, it's not really that important for the SAS
drives because you really don't need 72GB disks to install a UNIX
operating system such as FreeBSD :)  But it's still good to have the
extra space for your application.

But anyway, if you really need storage space, then a SAN is your best
bet (assuming you can afford it, of course) EMC, Hitachi and
StorageTek include so much cache (~256GB) in their boxes that the
rotational speed of the drives is not that important in the end
because most read/write operations are to/from this cache. Then again,
your problem here is that FreeBSD is not supported by those machines.

-- 
David Robillard
david.robillard at gmail.com
Montreal: +1 514 966 0122