> transactions and much faster in `stupid raw dd throughput', but in all
> other cases, the scsi was faster in transactions but slower in raw
> throughput (I think Andrew Doren is still improving the performance on
> the 2100S driver).
> 
> My gut feel is that if you can afford it, stick with LVD SCSI and a
> hardware RAID card, because of the simplicity of cabling, and the card

it's all true. but not when one big SCSI drive costs more than whole
machine without drives.

> is a bit better about funky stuff like drive replacement. Also, the
> higher end cards support battery backed up write cache. SCSI has the
> advantage that it supports stuff like bad block mapping, which AFAICT
> IDE doesn't (I got a bad block in an IDE disk under raidframe; time to
> rip the drive out and send it back under warrenty)
> 
> For a home system or small server, however, I think you can't go wrong
> with the 2 device Escalade to mirror 2 drives, or the 4 drive version
> to do RAID1+0 (RAID1 mirror then RAID0 stripe the mirrors), especially
> if you put the drives in hot-plug ide carriers (which cost ~ U$15 here
> in Australia).

for up to 4 drives wouldn't be software solution OK?

> I should whip up report on my experiences with scsi raidframe, ide
> raidframe, scsi h/w raid and ide h/w raid. i'll add that to my todo,
> after a bunch of work related stuff and my freenix paper.