EIDE eServer 325

 

Base Model Features and Specifications	Part No	Unit Price	Quantity	Price
eServer 325 Form factor Rack Processor type Opteron Processor speed 2200 MHz Processor cache 1024 KB Hard drive type EIDE Memory 1024 MB Maximum memory 12288 MB Optical drive 24X CD-ROM	883562X	$3,389.00	1	$3,389.00
Accessories and Options Selected	Part No	Unit Price	Quantity	Price
80GB 7200rpm EIDE ATA/100 HDD	09N4226	$189.00	1	$189.00
eServer 325 Opteron processor model 248	13N0701	$1,499.00	1	$1,499.00
No Internal RAID	32P9669	$0.00	1	$0.00
1GB PC2700 CL2.5 ECC DDR SDRAM RDIMM	73P2267	$619.00	4	$2,476.00
Warranty service upgrade; 3 year onsite repair 24x7x4 hour	69P9507	$599.00	1	$599.00
			Total:	$8152.00

That is without any taxes or shipping. These prices are a bit out of date, as IBM hasn't updated the AMD stuff for the 325 is a bit. SO it'll prolly be cheaper... and you can prolly get the 250GB drives as well.

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SCSI eServer 325 

Base Model Features and Specifications	Part No	Unit Price	Quantity	Price
eServer 325 Form factor Rack Processor type Opteron Processor speed 2200 MHz Processor cache 1024 KB Hot swap HDD Yes Memory 1024 MB Maximum memory 12288 MB Optical drive 24X CD-ROM	883561X	$3,399.00	1	$3,399.00
Accessories and Options Selected	Part No	Unit Price	Quantity	Price
Integrated Mirroring - 2 HDD's required	01R1356	$0.00	1	$0.00
eServer 325 Opteron processor model 248	13N0701	$1,499.00	1	$1,499.00
IBM 73.4 GB 10K rpm Ultra320 SCSI Hot-Swap HDD	32P0727	$439.00	2	$878.00
Warranty service upgrade; 3 year onsite repair 24x7x4 hour	69P9507	$599.00	1	$599.00
1GB PC2700 CL2.5 ECC DDR SDRAM RDIMM	73P2267	$619.00	4	$2,476.00
			Total:	$8851.00

Personally iffn it is only $700, I'd go with the u320 Mirrored Drives meself.

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The Opterons now. Good a time as any.

With RAID 10, you need to have FULL redundancy. 2 Controllers, 4 Disk (2 on each) for it to be fast. Basically duplicate data paths to make it faster.

Why would you want 1 controller with 4 disk? I am assuming you have an LX IBM ServeRAID card right? Meaning one channel. You have the data going to 2 disks first and then the other 2 second. On a single channel this makes it SLOW SLOW on Writes. No matter if you were on Raid 0 or not. Reads, different story, the controller will just ask the drives with the heads closest to get the data.

BTW, I am not talking about vpaths either. Seperate Bus for seperate instance of data. RAID-5 is different, reads and writes are nominal, but seperate arrays on seperate controllers (maybe just channels) in RAID-50, would beat RAID-10 in both reads and writes.

Of course this all changes when you only have one drive per channel, the 3ware stuff IOW.

Think about this, u320 is actually u80 with auto-matic hardware encoding (u160 uses the same type of blackmagic, but fewer tokens) the clocking is still the same. That is why u320 drives work on u160 and u80 channels. When it comes down to it, the scsi channel gets saturated quite easily in the different configs, unless they are designed specifically for the purpose at hand.

Whereas the Seperate Channel for each drive methodology is only limited by the controllers fabric and main IO capability.

Now, if this was SSA, things would be different, from a stand point of stacking rather than saturation, the SSA controller has two ways to access any device at a time... but still serial is still serial.