Vinny Abello wrote:
First off, you're right about moving parts generally being a bad thing. However, it is not always necessary to eliminate the hard drive. Two drives in a RAID-0 configuration may be reliable enough. Especially if the failure of a single drive sets off sufficient alarms so that it can quickly be hot-swapped for a new drive.
I'm assuming you meant RAID-1. In RAID-0 if you 'swapped' any drive all your striped data is toast. ;)
Oops. Yes. of course I meant RAID-1.
Then there's the issue of the PCI bus. Standard PCI (32-bit 33MHz) has a theoretical maximum bandwidth of about 1Gbit/s. But you can never use all of a PCI bus's bandwidth, so actual limits will be less than this.
True... unless going for 64 bit PCI at 66MHz...
64/66 PCI has 4 times as much bandwidth - about 4Gbit/s. Much better than standard PCI, but hard to find on a PC-compatible motherboard, and expensive when you do find it. Enough bandwidth for 10 line-rate 100M Ethernet ports or six line-rate OC-3 ports (in theory, anyway). But not really enough for anything faster (OC-12 or GigE) if you want line-rate forwarding. -- David