Re: an FYI on the Dell Dimension 9200 @ TSW

Greg Merritt wrote:
>
> Some folks we support picked up the Dell Dimension 9200 on special @
> TSW. Turns out that it comes with...
>
> ''SATA RAID 0 With Dual 160GB 10000 RPM Hard Drives''
>
> RAID 0 puts all of your eggs in one basket -- if one drive has a
> problem, you lose the entire C:\ volume. You do gain a good increase in
> write speed... which isn't too important to most users. It does this at
> the cost of, if you like, "twice" the chance of a drive failure killing
> your whole boot volume, which is probably a bit more than most standard
> users have bargained for. Mirrored RAID might arguably serve the
> typical user a bit better.
>
> I called and chatted with a TSW sales rep, who is going to check in with
> the Dell rep to see if this is what they intended to offer to campus.
> In the meantime, I thought I'd toss this out to Micronet so that if
> others are shopping for this special, they can be certain about what
> they're getting.

Most SATA interfaces these days will do both RAID 0 and RAID 1, aka
Mirrored RAID (but not on the same array), so I'd be a bit surprised if
this one _only_ did RAID 0.

(Here are the definitions of RAID levels:
<http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/R/RAID.html>)

I agree with the point that for the average user, Level 0 isn't ideal if
what they're doing is misssion-critical stuff. But if they just need a
big repository to store temporary or easily-reconstructed data, RAID 0
can be a good idea. For workstations that are frequently re-imaged,
RAID 0 might work just fine. It's like the song goes:

To everything, turn, turn, turn
There is a season, turn, turn, turn
[...]
A time to mirror, a time to stripe
A time you may tolerate failure
A time for speed, I swear it's not too late.

michael

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Received on Wed Dec 13 2006 - 16:39:28 PST