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In the Forums... |
Posted: May 30, 2001 Written by: Tuan "Solace" Nguyen The Hardware (con.t) The Controller: AMI Express 300 RAID with 32MB Cache Our server is going to be able to do heavy application sharing, FTP serving, website publishing and database thrashing. All this is going to be a heavy hit on our storage subsystem. Regular plain-o IDE won’t cut it in our machine. SCSI is the only way to go here. If you don’t have enough cash to get a SCSI RAID card, you can plunk out about $50 for a Promise FastTrak 100 IDE RAID controller. Attaching two IBM Deskstar drives to it will give you performance numbers unmatched by even some SCSI drives.  However, this is Tweak3D and we won’t be held back. Thus, I’m going full force on an Ultra160 SCSI RAID controller by AMI. The model we chose is the Express 300 card. It comes standard with 16MB of cache but our card came with 32MB. Bonus! Here are some of the features of the Express 300: Intel i960RM 100MHz Processor, 32MB PC133 ECC SDRAM (128MB supported), Built-in hardware XOR engine for RAID parity, Supports 15 devices per channel, Ultra160 SCSI LVD support, RAID levels 0, 1, 3, 5, 10, 30 and 50 supported, Tagged Command Queuing, Supports Scatter/Gather, Multi-threading of up to 256 commands simultaneously, Variable stripe size for all logical drives, Automatic and transparent rebuild of hot spare drives, Hot swapping of new drives without down time, And hardware MSCS server clustering support. Those are just a few of the high-end capabilities the Express 300 supports. The features I listed are the most important ones though. Obviously, this card isn’t a toy. The Hard Drives: 2x Quantum Atlas V (36GB total) To take advantage of our AMI Express 300 I’ve decided to go with two Ultra160 SCSI drives from Quantum. They’ll be operating in RAID 0 mode for speed.  These drives spin at 7200RPM and have an average access time of 6.3ms. Since they are striped in RAID 0, I felt that using higher RPM drives would just add to the cost of the overall server. And thanks to the Express 300 card, more drives can be added to server at any time. If you really want mass storage space, you can add a single IBM Deskstar 75GXP drive to the server. Since it will only serve as archiving, a large 46GB model or up should be fine for most needs. |
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