[Savannah-hackers] Re: subversions hda disk (continued)

[Paul Fisher]

On Sun, Mar 16, 2003 at 10:13:44AM +0000, Ward Vandewege wrote:
> 
> I agree with Jeff - SCSI is usually not worth it. Keep in mind,
> however, that software raid does slow down disk access considerably
> on writing, especially when moving around large amounts of data.

We try to avoid SCSI at the FSF because of cost concerns.  IDE is
generally fast enough, and hot-swapping isn't a huge concern.  SCSI
drives are not cheap, and we've already had to replace a bunch of the
drives on gnudist and gnuftp.  Since those machines are donated,
there's no warranty on the drives.

It's also not possible to monitor hardware RAID with free software
(minus possibly having a DAC960 setup), so for the original setup of
gnudist and gnuftp, we had no way of knowing how close to failure the
machines were.  Software RAID with GNU/Linux is quite good these days,
and we're using it for monty-python (mail.gnu.org) and the new gnuftp
(which is not yet live, and will replace gnudist).

We should make sure that the next savannah box has RAID.