With the drive vendors now currently selling 3TB drives (and 4TB drives in the near future), what are the advantages/disadvantages of using these massive storage devices? Large drives are great … you can fit a lot of data into a much smaller storage footprint, but there is a downside. Whether you purchase a 500gb, 1TB, [...]

The wife hit the roof this morning. Literally (and believe me it’s a long way from the top of the wife to the ceiling). From July 1 the price I pay for electricity increased by 20% … ouch. This is a significant increase in the running cost of a home and a business. It’s a [...]

This handy tip is part of a larger document that one of our very knowledgeable people put together. It’s part of our “best practices” to ensure that your system performs to it’s utmost for the longest period of time. Adaptec Storage Manager can be configured to send email messages (or notifications) about events on a [...]

(I think I’ve watched the Karate Kid too many times) System builders are often faced with the dilemma of adding enough drives to a system to meet a customer’s capacity and performance requirements. The traditional approach has been to purchase a chassis large enough to hold all the drives internally. This approach has a few [...]

Question to the Storage Advisors: Pete: Wanting to use the 5805 with sas hard drives and also a quantum sas tape drive that’s on the compatibility list. Is there any performance disadvantage to using them both on the same card? Pete … good question. I presume you’ve asked this because in days gone by you [...]

Just had a discussion with a customer who has a 5805 raid card and 7 1tb drives (vendor not an issue here). He originally contacted me asking what the grey ribbon cable on the cables provided with our card were for, but we quickly moved past that to looking at his planned system config. Note [...]

Not many people have picked up the fact that we have a performance tuning option on our 5 and 6 series cards that optimises the card cache for OLTP. What is OLTP I hear you ask? Onlne Transaction Processing. Now why isn’t that OTP instead of OLTP? Doesn’t matter … I’m drifting again. The setting [...]

Question to the Storage Advisors: Craig: We are working out the design of a new storage server. We need space over speed in every possible way. This server is in effect near line storage. We want to use RAID 6 or 60. My question is how many disks is it recommended to have in a [...]

I was working the stand on a tradeshow recently when a very nice gentleman stopped by to ask me some performance questions about our RAID cards. This is not an unusual scenario, but this customers system was pretty unique and it made me think quite a bit about what different poeple are looking for from [...]

Howdy folks (yes it’s been a while since I put keyboard to screen, or pen to paper, or chisel to stone) … I recently had a customer telling me that Fusion IO is faster than MaxIQ, and that therefore it is a better technology for his server. I have absolutely no beef with the speed [...]