[David Konerding]
> 4 drives 36gig Ultra 2 SCSI (or LVD? or Ultra 3?) (3 active drives & 1 hot
> spare)
Make sure to consider 4-drive raid1 as well
> From poking around the kernel, and reading some stuff on web sites, and
> visiting the vendor websites, it seems like the less expensive cards
> ($500-1000) typically don't have a battery backup for the cache on the card.
> I was thinking, however, that
> the UPS makes the cache battery unecessary. Is this a valid belief? Or is
> there a situation where having the battery backup
> is a good idea?
I personally trust my UPS just fine. battery-backed write cache is
(IMHO) more a check-mark on Draconian TPC-type auditing to ensure
recovery capability.
> Also, exactly what will having SAF/TE support on the card and the drive
> enclosure gain me? Any pointers to SAF/TE documentation online would be
> appreciated.
http://www.safte.org/
> Will I save a lot of $$$ by eliminating the requirement for hot-swap and
> SAF/TE on the rackmount enclosure?
Probably not, and when things go bad, life is much easier with a nice
SAF-TE compliant enclosure to work with.
James
