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Both of these are serious computational engines. I have dual XEONs in a
Dell PowerEdge, it's the system most likely to evoke a subjective, wow!
this is fast.
The components from the Tyan to the Sparkle are some of my
favorites. Except the Seagate, I know a few who use a lot of drives and
have developed a 'tude over Seagate reliability. The WD Raptor is fast but
for a less expensive drive I use the Hitachi (formerly IBM's drive
division) Deskstar 7K250. Here is an article comparing those, it includes
a Seagate but the one you are considering is faster than the one in this
article, not as fast as the Deskstar
http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200310/20031007HDS722525VLSA80_1.html
(array of drives) RAID striping is 50% faster, it writes to one drive
then the other then goes back to the first to see if its done yet, also
doubles the chance of failure on the component most likely to fail. Raid5
is mission critical, 3 drives of duplication, if anything goes wrong it
determines which drives are right. With a pile of drives you can mirror a
stripe. A bit of a complication but on systems of this class drives can be
the bottleneck so worth careful consideration.
If the backups aren't handled by separate system I consider that when
building. Putting an extra drive in which does nothing but backups is
easy. DVD writers that do several GB per side and are down around $125.
> Be VERY, VERY careful of vendors on pricewatch.com <
I'll add another very :) On this system I assume someone else is going
to build it and would let them source everything just to be clear they are
responsible for it as a package.
http://www.pricewatch.com/ is great, http://resellerratings.com/
too, either way I check the Better Business
Bureau http://search.bbb.org/search.html Sometimes have to drill into
the local bureau but often enough a www or phone# will hit from the
national search.
Mike
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