RAID controller question...

[Greg Lindahl]

> phew!  I'm not trying to belittle those of you who believe in RAID
> hardware, but these prices are enough to stop and make you think.
> $1275 is 50G of fast, cool UDMA disk.  yes, such disks will only sustain
> 12-14 MB/s apiece, but I've heard people report good results using the MD 
> driver under Linux.

That's all true. But if you want continuous uptime, the RAID system
(with SCSI hotswap hardware) can do it. I'd suspect that the Linux
systems need downtime in order to replace a failed disk. So it all
depends on what capabilities you need. Your typical scientific
computing cluster won't need RAID.

> remember, the touchstone of Beowulf is off-the-shelf, commodity hardware.

Um, RAID controllers _are_ off-the-shelf, commodity hardware. However,
computing the price vs. features is something everyone should always
do when buying hardware.

-- g