Re: HDD + FD info

Michael Samuel wrote:
>
> On Thu, 19 Mar 1998, Bill Wichers wrote:
>
> > I'm doing some research into building a series of smaller caches (for
> > schools mainly), and the idea is too keep costs down as much as possible.
> > My question:
> >
> > Does anyone have any expierience using UDMA hard drive in a Squid box? I
> > really, really don't want to use IDE (slow, fail too much, you know), but
> > SCSI would result in a significantly higher cost for the schools. UDMA
> > might be a good balence. Any expierience?
>
> I haven't done any production level tests, but I can tell you, if you use
> Linux, to get the performance required for a proxy cache to be worth
> having on IDE (nothing does real UDMA anyway yet), you'll need so much RAM
> that it would be the same cost to just buy a SCSI hard disk :-)
>
> This wasn't even on a production machine (just a home test)...

I think that's subjective. It depends on the number of clients,
available bandwidth, number of requests, etc, etc, etc. We use IDE
drives in all our squid caches (we have 9 in toto), and in most cases we
choose IDE drives with slower seek times. At the available
input-bandwidth, the faster drives just aren't worth it, since even the
slowest of our IDE drives will still outperform our uplink by a
significant factor.

It starts to make a difference when you have many clients hammering away
at hits. We deployed satellite caches for that, which was a wise
decision anyway, given the intermediate links. All in all, the users are
very happy with the performance, as opposed to living without.

D
Received on Thu Mar 19 1998 - 17:10:17 MST