From: Tony Wicks tonyw@tonyw.com
I run Centos on Compaq dl380g1/2/3's and Dell servers. While the Compaqs are strong hardware they are old and frankly the performance compared to modern (cheap or otherwise) hardware is not really that impressive. A dual 1 gig P3 dl380 and ultra 3 scsi drives get significantly out performed by a generic celeron with software raid SATA drives.
Whoa!
Who said U160 SCSI was faster than SATA? That's a common farce! In fact, it's the whole reason why SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) is coming about. SAS can even use SATA drives.
I don't think that's is a good comparison at all. You're changing too many variables. Especially when you're comparing ultra-high density SATA drives to typical, lower-density U160 SCSI drives. Latency might be better, but throughout is clearly not.
It all depends on your application.
I firmly believe the best value for money and performance is the Dell Poweredge 750 with hardware raid SATA drives. The PE 750 is cheap and installs out of the box (Centos 3 and 4), performes flawlessly and is extremely fast.
Depends on the app, but you might be correct for many applications.
And, just because I'm curious, "hardware RAID SATA" by what controller?
-- Bryan J. Smith mailto:b.j.smith@ieee.org