Re: Re: [OT] (A little) : Firewire cables...

["Phil Harris" <phil@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Quite an enjoyable flight of fancy, looking at all the SAS/Sata kit
> floating around now.

Yes, I learned plenty...

> It won't be long before it's possible to build a proper SAN without
> breaking the bank - arguably, we are already there.

I'd definitely agree. There certainly are viable alternatives now for
reasonable scale external storae that simply weren't there a few years ago
and they're "UKHA_D Friendly" prices too! :-D

> One thing I'm a little confused about though - Phil, the "delayed
> write failure" problem you see... I thought the entire delayed
write
> subsystem was disabled if you turned off drive write caching for the
> drives?

Nope - there are so many possible cases for the problem floating around on
the inter-web and that is definitely one of them however in every
discussion I've found so far where someone claims to have found the
solution to what was causing their DWF problem there's replies further
down that say "that doesn't fix it for me" ...

... I couldn't nail the causes of mine (they weren't frequent enough to be
reliably repeatable) hence my defection to OSX for that purpose.

> I do this for my external USB 320Gb drives (I have 3 seagate units
> hooked up to my server for extra storage), and have never seend a
> blip out of them (although one of them did pop a delayed write
> failure before I disabled the caching.

I think it gets worse the more drives you have that are external too - at
the time I started out I had 8 and am now up to 26. :-(

> is it's only the write cache being disabled, it doesn't really impact
> performance (well, only for lots of small writes, not for big movie
> class copies).
>
> Have you been down this route without success?

Been down that route, took a whizz in the corner and came back
disappointed...

Phil