RE: Large Storage

["Phil Harris" <phil@xxxxxxx>]

> I can see where Phil is coming from now, so it may be better to have a
few
> more smaller drives rather than go for 250s then a failure would be
easier
> to recover from.

It's only easier to recover from if you're not using arrays of drives - if
you're using arrays in a non-redundant configuration then one drive goes
down and you're fooked - game over player one!

I'm using 16 x 160's in total simply because they were what was available
at
the time and 15 of them cost me the grand total of £0.00 - a mate's
employer
was updating their data farms and so he had a few spare 160 Gb drives
sitting on his desk and needed a stereo fitting to his Imprezza. ;-)

The next time I buy drives I'll probably go for 300 Gb units (or whatever
is
biggest) simply because you end up with less drives to house (physically)
that way - believe me, housing loads of drives is an absolute *NIGHTMARE*
... well, OK, technically housing the drives isn't but cooling them
effectively, keeping them within cable distances of the controller cards
and
squeezing in the power and data cables into the available space is stuff
that I honestly do have dreams about still. :-( What you tend to find is
that the cases that are advertised as having shedloads of drive bays
actually only have about 1/3rd of them properly cooled - the rest just tend
to sit there and bake - and if you are using PCI based IDE controllers then
you will often find that the upper (or furthest away) drive bays are only
just in reach of the 90cm IDE cables but you can't use the
"slave" IDE
connector because of the stupid layout of the cables (Why do they insist on
sticking the master and slave connectors 30cm apart? Surely 5cm apart would
be more sensible so that you can cable adjacent drives without having to
accomodate a ruddy great "loop" of cable?) Finding cases that
have been made
big enough to handle the runs of cables too is quite difficult - I haven't
had a case yet where I haven't had bunches of IDE cables squeezed into
spaces that are too small. :-(

Phil