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Hot Swapable HD.

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by mario agosto

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I have a Windows 2k Server. Intel 1.0Ghz and 512Mb RAM. The primary function of the server is storage for the company information. I have an IDE RAID, I would like to move to a "SCSI hot swapable" solution, my problem is that I have never dealt withSCSI before. I am confused by all the different options, unfortunatelly I am pressed for time to resolve this issue, for that reason I don't have much time to learn about SCSI. I need between 40-100Gb of storage. I would appreciate some suggestions on good hard drives and scsi controllers. I would also like information about the best hardrives, or some webpages where I can find benchmarks, I would love to find something similar to tomshardware.com

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by greybeard770

For hot-swap disks you need a server with hot-swap bays or a hot-swap drive cage. You may want to consider a new server. Hewlett Packard has a LC2000 with 6 hot-swap drive bays. You will probably want a RAID card like the 1-M to handle that. The18GB SCSI drives will run about $500-600 each, as will the RAID card. RAID and SCSI are nice, but not cheap.

Biased opinion: Seagate and Western Digital are the only people who make disk drives. HP relabels them.

by wlbowers

Stay with IBM, Western Digital, or Segate. There are several vendors that will provide you with a hot swapable scsi external tower.

There are several vendors that provide disk array enclosures.

http://www.cdstorage.com/towers/CD_DVDserver.htm
http://www.cdstorage.com/raid/RaidTec/jbodspecs.htm
http://www.kintronics.com/raid/AdaptecSpecs.htm
http://www.currys.com/skydata/raidsilo.html

RAID Level 0 (Striping) is not redundant, data is split across drives, resulting in higher data throughput. Performance is very good, but the failure of any disk in the array results in data loss.

RAID Level 1 (mirroring) provides redundancy by duplicating all data from one drive on another drive. The performance of a level 1 array is only slightly better than a single drive, but if either drive fails, no data is lost.

RAID Level 2, which uses Hamming error correction codes, is intended for use with drives which do not have built-in error detection. All SCSI drives support built-in error detection.

RAID Level 3 stripes data at a byte level across several drives, with parity stored on one drive. It is otherwise similar to level 4. Byte-level striping requires hardware support for efficient use.

RAID Level 4 stripes data at a block level across several drives, with parity stored on one drive. The parity information allows recovery from the failure of any single drive. The performance of a level 4 array is very good for reads (the same as level0).Writes, however, require that parity data be updated each time.

RAID Level 5 is similar to level 4, but distributes parity among the drives. This can speed small writes in multiprocessing systems, since the parity disk does not become a bottleneck.

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