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Apple's Mac Pro to sport twin engines - Page 6

post #201 of 216
6/17/06 at 9:49am
Quote:
Originally posted by hmurchison
Well this is beyond the scope of consumers quite honestly but if some brave programming soul could do this you'd just create a LUN(virtual partition) for your backup apart from the rest of your SAN so that you'd never need to utilize it.

Sadly no one's into business level tools for the rest of us. Perhaps this will change. Imagine in 5 years when most of us are laughing about the Pre-Terabyte days

Oh a trend I'm definitely seeing in the biz sector is a move away from 3.5" drives to 2.5" SFF (Small Form Factor) SAS/SATA drives. Seagate just came out with their PR 146GB 10K SAS SFF drive. Great news for me because despite the 300GB drives that are available most customers seem to use the 73 and 146GB drives as their bread and butter size.

Now image the Xserve RAID going from a 14 Bay system to a SFF 22 Bay system? Now only would power consumption drop but you've added 8 more spindles and your performance jumps.

Unfortunately, so does the breakdown rate. But, I think we will see 2.5's moving into the consumer desktop space when they hit 300GB, and the price comes down another 25%.
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post #202 of 216
6/17/06 at 10:11am
Quote:
Originally posted by melgross
Unfortunately, so does the breakdown rate. But, I think we will see 2.5's moving into the consumer desktop space when they hit 300GB, and the price comes down another 25%.

Hear Hear.I don't have enough experience with the SFF drives to ascertain their reliability in production evironments. The shorter arm lengths and need for smaller motors though is supposed to increase reliability however that data comes right off of Seagate and Fujitsue marketing docs so you might have to take that with a grain of salt.

Everytime Seagate comes through I harass them about their SFF pricing. Love the benefits of SFF drives but hate the sharp increase in cost.

If Western Digital can make a Raptor SFF 10k SATA drive they won't be able to keep them in stock especially if the drives gets certified for use by various server vendors.

I love the idea of drive bays I just don't like the idea of large cases.
He's a mod so he has a few extra vBulletin privileges. That doesn't mean he should stop posting or should start acting like Digital Jesus.
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He's a mod so he has a few extra vBulletin privileges. That doesn't mean he should stop posting or should start acting like Digital Jesus.
- SolipsismX
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post #203 of 216
6/17/06 at 11:42am
Quote:
Originally posted by melgross
Unfortunately, so does the breakdown rate. But, I think we will see 2.5's moving into the consumer desktop space when they hit 300GB, and the price comes down another 25%.

Unfortunately, that's what everyone says...but when it finally does happen, there's always a massive 3.5" drive that comes to market at a good price and everyone needs it.

It's just like CPUs. I keep telling myself I'll be fine with the low end Mac Pro that Apple will put out...but who's kidding who, I'll be getting the top end.
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post #204 of 216
6/17/06 at 8:49pm
Quote:
Originally posted by hmurchison
Hear Hear.I don't have enough experience with the SFF drives to ascertain their reliability in production evironments. The shorter arm lengths and need for smaller motors though is supposed to increase reliability however that data comes right off of Seagate and Fujitsue marketing docs so you might have to take that with a grain of salt.

Everytime Seagate comes through I harass them about their SFF pricing. Love the benefits of SFF drives but hate the sharp increase in cost.

If Western Digital can make a Raptor SFF 10k SATA drive they won't be able to keep them in stock especially if the drives gets certified for use by various server vendors.

I love the idea of drive bays I just don't like the idea of large cases.

It's a matter of math. Two 250 drives are twice as likely to have a breakdown than one 500 drive. A crude way is to take the MTBF rates and divide it by the number of drives. It's actually worse than that.
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post #205 of 216
6/17/06 at 8:52pm
Quote:
Originally posted by kim kap sol
Unfortunately, that's what everyone says...but when it finally does happen, there's always a massive 3.5" drive that comes to market at a good price and everyone needs it.

It's just like CPUs. I keep telling myself I'll be fine with the low end Mac Pro that Apple will put out...but who's kidding who, I'll be getting the top end.

While that's true, we just have to look back to see the first full height 5.25" drives, and realise that they are long gone.

There comes a point where the increase in capacity is outweighed by the decrease in power usage, heat, noise, and reduction in volume.

While we have argued about the size of the G5 case, 2.5" drives would end that story.
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post #206 of 216
6/17/06 at 9:55pm
Quote:
Originally posted by melgross
It's a matter of math. Two 250 drives are twice as likely to have a breakdown than one 500 drive. A crude way is to take the MTBF rates and divide it by the number of drives. It's actually worse than that.

each drive has an equal chance of failure, but rather lose 250GB than 500GB...
I heard that geeks are a dime a dozen, I just want to find out who's been passin' out the dimes
----- Fred Blassie 1964
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I heard that geeks are a dime a dozen, I just want to find out who's been passin' out the dimes
----- Fred Blassie 1964
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post #207 of 216
6/18/06 at 9:08am
Quote:
Originally posted by melgross
It's a matter of math. Two 250 drives are twice as likely to have a breakdown than one 500 drive. A crude way is to take the MTBF rates and divide it by the number of drives. It's actually worse than that.

But you gain the favor of the odds. Your less likely for both drives to go down than you are likely to have one drive go down.
onlooker
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onlooker
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post #208 of 216
6/18/06 at 9:19am
Quote:
Originally posted by onlooker
But you gain the favor of the odds. Your less likely for both drives to go down than you are likely to have one drive go down.

You really don't though. It's far more likely that you will lose half of your information with two drives than you will lose all of it with one drive. And if you tie drives up as raids, you lose everything. Which is why raid 0 is only usefull for immediate capture, and why we get the files off as soon as we can.
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post #209 of 216
6/18/06 at 1:29pm
Quote:
Originally posted by melgross
You really don't though. It's far more likely that you will lose half of your information with two drives than you will lose all of it with one drive. And if you tie drives up as raids, you lose everything. Which is why raid 0 is only usefull for immediate capture, and why we get the files off as soon as we can.

I just lost a drive this week, and it's not my first. Without my second and Carbon Copy Cloner, I would still be without a computer.
onlooker
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post #210 of 216
6/18/06 at 7:30pm
Originally posted by melgross
...Which is why raid 0 is only usefull for immediate capture, and why we get the files off as soon as we can...

Of course. RAID 0 on your main drive and RAID 0 on the backup drive-set is not that sensible. The backup drive-set should be RAID 1.

Internally on the Mac Pro (when support comes, if ever) you should have the option of RAID 0 for two drives to get some speeed. Then externally you could have a box of at least 2 hotswappable drives (3-4 for the paranoid???) all in RAID 1 config, with the external box handling the RAID, etc.

As consumer RAID becomes more available, it should offer better options.

Hence my suggestion the MacPro should allow two drives internally RAID 0 for speedy access. And then you have your external box of 2-4* drives for RAID 1 backup (the external drives are seen as 1 logical drive) via FW800, with also GigEthernet for it to serve as a SAN for other users if needed...

Does my last paragraph make sense? 8)

*If you are using 4 drives RAID 1 is quad-redundant which may be overkill so other mirror+stripe, etc. options may be better....
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post #211 of 216
6/18/06 at 10:27pm
Quote:
Originally posted by onlooker
I just lost a drive this week, and it's not my first. Without my second and Carbon Copy Cloner, I would still be without a computer.

I agree, that's why I said that I use HD's for backup. I've lost a number of them over the years. But the fact still remains that if you have ten running all of the time there is a greater than a ten times chance that one will go out.
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post #212 of 216
6/18/06 at 10:30pm
Quote:
Originally posted by sunilraman
Originally posted by melgross
...Which is why raid 0 is only usefull for immediate capture, and why we get the files off as soon as we can...

Of course. RAID 0 on your main drive and RAID 0 on the backup drive-set is not that sensible. The backup drive-set should be RAID 1.

Internally on the Mac Pro (when support comes, if ever) you should have the option of RAID 0 for two drives to get some speeed. Then externally you could have a box of at least 2 hotswappable drives (3-4 for the paranoid???) all in RAID 1 config, with the external box handling the RAID, etc.

As consumer RAID becomes more available, it should offer better options.

Hence my suggestion the MacPro should allow two drives internally RAID 0 for speedy access. And then you have your external box of 2-4* drives for RAID 1 backup (the external drives are seen as 1 logical drive) via FW800, with also GigEthernet for it to serve as a SAN for other users if needed...

Does my last paragraph make sense? 8)

*If you are using 4 drives RAID 1 is quad-redundant which may be overkill so other mirror+stripe, etc. options may be better....

Well, it all sort of does.

I never recommend Raid for anyone who doesn't actually need it. People seem to think they do, when they don't.

Mirroring is a safe bet, as you say. Raid 5 is the best, if you can get support for it.
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post #213 of 216
6/18/06 at 10:39pm
Quote:
Originally posted by sunilraman
*If you are using 4 drives RAID 1 is quad-redundant which may be overkill so other mirror+stripe, etc. options may be better....

Quad-redundant?!?

I think not

RAID 1 doesn't mirror to all available drives, it mirrors to two logical drives

If you have four HDDs, than it sees two logical drives (each made up of two HDDs), not four

So no, no 'quad-redundancy'

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Late 2009 Unibody MacBook (modified)
2.26GHz Core 2 Duo CPU/8GB RAM/60GB SSD/500GB HDD
SuperDrive delete
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post #214 of 216
6/18/06 at 11:22pm
My boo-boo, 4 drives RAID 1 would be 2 mirrored pairs and hence the system will see 2 logical drives.
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post #215 of 216
6/18/06 at 11:37pm
Originally posted by melgross
...But the fact still remains that if you have ten running all of the time there is a greater than a ten times chance that one will go out...


Yeah, kind of weird. The more HDs you have, the more likely you will experience 1 drive failure. Yet the more HDs you have, the "safer" you are (assuming 1:1 mirroring on all the HDs).

I guess depends how paranoid one is, to choose whether to have (on top of the primary internal HD data) 1 backup set, or 2 backup sets, or 3 backup sets... Maybe 2 backup sets to 2 separate HDs and archiving various parts over time to DVD.

Okay, I've derailed this thread enough with my enquiries.
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post #216 of 216
6/19/06 at 12:24am
Quote:
Originally posted by sunilraman
Originally posted by melgross
...But the fact still remains that if you have ten running all of the time there is a greater than a ten times chance that one will go out...


Yeah, kind of weird. The more HDs you have, the more likely you will experience 1 drive failure. Yet the more HDs you have, the "safer" you are (assuming 1:1 mirroring on all the HDs).

I guess depends how paranoid one is, to choose whether to have (on top of the primary internal HD data) 1 backup set, or 2 backup sets, or 3 backup sets... Maybe 2 backup sets to 2 separate HDs and archiving various parts over time to DVD.

Okay, I've derailed this thread enough with my enquiries.

If you mirror, you will always be safer. That's why it's done. But most people don't do any backups. It's those people who have the greater problem. Backup drives are supposed to be unpowered until they are being used, then unpowered again.

The idea of the fasmily tree is the correct way to back up valuble data. And keep them off site, if possible.
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